Prairie Fire is my new hybrid graphical adventure/interactive fiction project. The 60's are over, but nothing's been solved, and youth unrest sweeps across the nation. UW Madison is being rocked by protests, and you play the role of a student reporter, whose only goal is to get one good story and get out. And here's that story.
Prairie Fire is written in Inform7 (a common interactive fiction programming language), but relies on sounds and graphics to tell a lot of the story. If you've played interactive fiction (text adventures, Zork, Planetfall) before, things should feel familiar. If not, all the better, as I'm hoping to reach an audience outside of the IF community.
Feedback
Feel free to post your comments here, but transcripts would really be great. When you begin play, simply type TRANSCRIPT and the game will output a file you can send me. If you want to go above and beyond, you can also comment in the game itself (by typing something like *THERE'S A TYPO HERE or *BUG WITH OPENING THE DOOR - just offset it by a rare character so I can search through the document easily). You can send the transcripts to me at my gmail account which is <my handle with 1984 at the end at gmail>
The game is playable (and somewhat tested) for the first third - the second third is playable, but not tested. I'm most interested in comments about the interface and communicating with the game. How often are your commands understood and how often is the parser totally off base?
Screenshots
Links
Windows
https://rcpt.yousendit.com/1153437227/5301594589a3f0a6bfda515c3c5ed55eHere's the complete package. Just drag the .glorb onto the .exe and it should be fine. It should adjust automatically, but if it doesn't try to adjust the size of the window to about 1000 x 700 - otherwise the interface will feel quite messed up.
Mac
https://www.yousendit.com/download/UnlEZm1YcVhOQnhFQlE9PQYou'll have to install the interpreter (Spatterlight, included) first. Then just open up the .gblorb file. Try to adjust the size of the window to about 1000 x 700 - otherwise the interface will feel quite messed up.
Sounds and music don't seem to work for most Macs yet, so be sure to turn the sounds off when you start playing (this tells the program that sound is off, and sound effects will be written out).
Teaser Trailer
There's no gameplay in it. It's just for atmosphere.
Developer
