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[Chaoseed]

Here we go! An interactive fiction game in a Lovecraftian vein!

The Duel, v.01 - Z5 format (Most recent version!)
The Duel, v.00 - Z5 format (for historical purposes only)

Now, I used a Commonplace Book quote as the starting point, of course. However...if I reveal what it is, it'll spoil the surprise ending. Not that it's a really surprising surprise, I'm sure a lot of you will see it coming...and of course if you're going to offer comments and criticisms then you need to know...but still. The point is, I'm going to put the Commonplace Book quote here in a really tiny font so you can't see it unless you put in a little effort:

COMMONPLACE BOOK QUOTE HERE - 8 Hor. Sto.
Man makes appt. with old enemy. Dies—body keeps appt.

I'll leave it up to you to decide when to read that.

(Darnit, I know there's SOME way to do spoiler tags on this forum, but I can't figure out how. Can anyone tell me?)

Okay. So I have this little IF game. At the moment it's pretty short; I'm sure to be truly Lovecraftian it needs more detail...more puzzles would be good (one, arguably two locations are pointless). Still, it is playable and winnable! So I'd appreciate any further ideas or criticisms.

EDIT NOVEMBER 28th: Added v.01, the second version of the game. It takes into account some of the comments from the thread and just basically plays more smoothly.

[atuun]

Oh cool, more IF! I'm just running through it now, and I'll put my thoughts in small text so I don't spoil anything for anyone else:

-Some stuff doesn't seem to be implemented; so if the text reads "shutters keep out all light" and I type >X SHUTTERS, Inform says "You can't see any such thing." It'd probably be easiest just to change the default response to something like "Thoughts of revenge drive such banal curiosities from your mind." (but better written, obviously ) Otherwise, you could implement these sort of things as scenery.

-I like how the writing is urgent, rushing you to the confrontation.

-That's awesome that you can just knock down the door instead of unlocking it.

-You're removing people from play when they die, right? It's a bit jarring to try and examine a corpse and have the prompt say there's no such thing. You could try having separate body objects and moving them into the room once their counterpart has been killed if you wanted to.

-Ha, ending the game like that (***you have died***) was great! But you should disable score at the end since there is no way to score any points...(for now?)

-If you don't hold the letter at the Compound when the rogue is alive, you try and search the torch instead. The same thing happens in Mazarin's Room ("You find nothing of interest in the Mazarin.")

-Perhaps a discrepancy at the end: the Sargeant says both men were killed within minutes of each other, but just a few lines later he says you died a week ago. It's entirely possible I misunderstood though!

-You also released the game in debug mode, so I could PURLOIN stuff, but that's not really an error when you're still working on the game.

So, just some random musings (which are mostly technical). Hopefully you don't think I was too hard on you, cause this really was a great interpretation of the commonplace entry! I don't know what else you could add for puzzles though, really. I think the way the game rushes you through empathizes the PC's state of mind pretty well, and more puzzles might detract from that. You might want to get some other people's opinions first though; I'll have to confess here I'm a big fan of puzzleless IF.

I'll be waiting for whatever you choose to do with this! 

[Chaoseed]

Just to let you know, I wanted to get the first version out here as soon as I can (actually I wanted to get it out a week ago, but, y'know...). So, some of the finishing details are not exactly implemented. Stuff like, there are shutters mentioned in a description, but you can't look at them. I just hadn't gone through and put in every little detail like that.

I'm not saying you shouldn't talk about those details--definitely point them out. I'm just saying, don't be too surprised that they're not there. And yeah, the release is in debug mode, too. The final one won't be.

Thanks for your comments!

[atuun]

Ah, okay! Sorry for being so hard on it then . Good luck with next version!

[Chaoseed]

Haha, it's fine, criticism is welcome.

[Noyb]

Looks like it's off to a good start. I don't have much feedback to add to Atuun's, except that you might want to somehow convey even more urgency. Sitting back and trying to look and toy with things while the game alternates its two urging prompts makes the urgency lose some of its impact. Perhaps you can experiment with some negative feedback for waiting too long in a location. Maybe the protagonist could start act on his urges autonomously in ways the player doesn't want or expect, or else get increasingly more tense and angry if all the player does is sit and look at things.

[Chaoseed]

Check it out! The Duel v.01, new and improved! (Well, not much has changed, but I took the comments in this thread into account to make sure it ran more smoothly.)