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Finished Zarf's new game The Dreamhold last night. It's his first new text adventure in over four years, and as good as I'd expect: a tight, thoughtful, and somewhat tragic fantasy. The big draw is that it's meant to serve as an introduction to the whole medium of interactive fiction by way of a "Tutorial Voice" that accompanies you and offers you help and hints proactively as you play and explore.

I can't speak for how well that works, because I played in "expert mode", where the Voice shuts up and some of the puzzles are harder. And I found that it plays great that way; at no point did I feel like I was running a newbie obstacle course, or anything. My total play time was probably around 12 hours and I needed nudges from rec.games.int-fiction to figure a couple of things out (one of which is an arguable, if minor, flaw that Zarf has said he'll soften up in the next release). I was quite absorbed into the world from start to finish. (Sign that I enjoy an adventure game: when I'm done using something in-world, I feel compelled to return it to its case instead of just walking around with it, even though it doesn't technically affect game play either way.)

Even though I didn't play with the tutorial mode on, I will take the chance it affords me to once again shout into the wind at alla y'all that you really ought to give this a try, because it's lonely being the only person I know personally (besides Zarf) who (correct me if I'm wrong!) regularly plays and enjoys modern text adventure games.

The easiest way to start playing is probably the online version.

You could also download the game file, and then open it with a Z-code interpreter for your computer. Z-code is the machine language that this game (and many others like it) is written in; an interpreter is a program that turns this into machine language that your own computer can understand. (Click on your operating system's name on the left side of that page, and then choose a program from the resulting list. This is the best page I could find on the subject, and it took a while. I wonder if this somewhat esoteric two-step process necessary to start playing interactive fiction games makes the medium all the more inaccessible... I ponder making a very short version of this same website, listing on one page only the three PC OSes that most of the world uses, with the two or three top interpreters under each one.)

(Look for cthulhia's name in the credits!)

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The last two days have been a solid tear of the big V, typing, thinking, and doodling for hours and hours while my cold sublimes out of my head. It's good medicine. I'm working on implementing the "game finder" in Frivolity (the Perl-based server software), and it's coming along very well. This is a key wow-cool feature that will allow people to see what types of games the Volity network knows about, what servers provide them, and what active games happen to be afoot at those servers.

I sketched out the protocol about a month in advance of trying to code any of it, and something interesting strikes me now: it's more flexible than I was expecting. The protocol simply defines a series of service-discovery interviews that a client may perform on Volity's various network entities in order to gather the information that it needs to assemble a game finder to show the user, but it doesn't prescribe what, precisely, it does with this information, or how it presents it. This flexibility comes at a price, because clients have to do a lot of message-juggling in order to sort everything out, even for the simple text-based interface I'm making for Friv. But I think it's worth it; I can foresee some really nifty features patterned after things I have seen in online games since designing the protocol, without having to make any protocol-level changes. And that's cool.

Anyway, I figure as long as I keep the protocol well-documented, any reasonable amount of message-hunting isn't all that painful. And I must say that starting to treat the Volity wiki as the core documentation source was a breakthrough idea.

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One reason I have been working so hard involved my thinking that I was trying to meet a Dec. 31 deadline that I had set for myself, and I didn't want to invalidate the roadmap I just laid down my missing what appeared to be its first goal (even while cursing myself for setting it so early)! But tonight, bruised and battered, I dragged myself over to the task list to update my progress, and saw that it's actually due on January 31. (Of next year, ha ha.) What relief! I'm actually declaring some time off from Frivolity for a while, if you can believe it. (Though there's related matters to attend to... in a bizarre inversion of the usual model, our Java client's UI developer can get his latest changes to work on every computer except his own. Paying him a visit tomorrow morning with my laptop to compare work environments. It's actually pretty funny, if you're into that sort of thing.)

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I see there is new mailing list mail, including wrog punching me in the face repeatedly with ugly realities about game record-keeping, and misuba invoking the seductive, perilous, and unavoidable topic of SVG UI widgets. That's for later, though; now I will sink into this here copy of Myst IV:Revelation that I just bought for some reason.