And now for the bit that I didn’t have time to type out last night. :)

Twisty Little Passages is a neat history of interactive fiction; the genre that has grown out of text adventures. I bought my hardback copy from a bookshop stall at GDC in 2005, and have to confess that I still haven’t read the whole thing; it’s been on my “to be finished the next time I take a flight somewhere” list for ages, but keeps being passed over at the last moment, since it’s a reasonably sizable hardback book. In any case, the book is copyright 2003, and is published by The MIT Press.

I used to be heavily into interactive fiction, to the point that I had a few games of my own in progress, one of which was a tiny little experimental game entitled “The Jaws of Victory”, which I’d intended to finish up and enter in three different IFComp competitions, but was completely stuck for a satisfying endgame sequence. Oh well. But I do still play the IFComp entries each year, though often not in time for the voting deadline.

Since it was mentioned in the quote providing the theme for the GiaW, I spent some time looking at Mystery House today, as well as a few of the revamps and spoofs over at Mystery House Taken Over. I’d not seen the game before, and as it turns out, it’s really an interesting piece of gaming history. I’m going to need to make a few nods to it in my game. :)

Anyhow. My plan now is to start prototyping the basic gameplay using a static set of data, both level geometry and events. Once I have a basic gameplay prototype, I’ll return to random generation of the game data, to make it play differently each time. Hopefully I’ll have a few concept screenshots within a day or two.