Re: 3rd Person IF??

["J Walrus" <abiltcliffe@bigfoot.NOHORMELPRODUCTS.com>]

Soleck <soleck@aol.com> wrote in message
20000302121512.01257.00003564@ng-xe1.aol.com">news:20000302121512.01257.00003564@ng-xe1.aol.com...
> >I don't know if I'd call 'Suspended' a first-person perspective game.
> >It's a tough call, though.  The protagonist is referred to as 'you',
> >but he takes no actions on his own;
>
> Yeah...I agree...it's borderline.  All of  the descriptions came from
the
> robots, and I THINK I remember they talked in first person ("I see a
blue
> computer chip")
> I could be remembering wrong though.
>
> The game was extremely difficult (unfairly so, IMHO). I worked on it
off and on
> for years and NEVER really solved it.  Then again, I found it
facinating enough
> to keep coming back to year after year, which
> has got to say something for it.
>
> Haven't seen any other I-F games that even come close to the same
concept, but
> I'd like to.  I'd write one myself, but I'm a greeeeen newbie, still
way too
> damp behind the ears to even think about what a nightmare it would be
to
> design.

It does seems that, as you say, the design would be the hardest element.
The actual interface shouldn't be too hard to implement (ok, I wouldn't
try it, but I'm pretty greeeeen too) but designing it so that the
multiple characters were actually an important element of the game
rather than just a curiosity would be quite a challenging task. Infocom
did it well, but didn't Suspended seem a lot shorter, once you knew what
you were doing, than a lot of their other games? I wonder if this was to
do with the multiple characters.

(Of course, it could have been size limitations, since you need six
different descriptions for everything in the game. As yet, I don't have
much of a feel for how much game you can fit into a (128k?) .dat z-code
file, but does anyone else think this could have been the reason?)


Jw