Pills by Henry Blank

[raw]
made by Henry Blank for LD18 (COMPO)
Hey !

Pills is a text-based adventure, otherwise named interactive fiction (I guess). Featuring 12 endings, a party at the beach, a ménage à trois, broken ribs, a roguelike map, procedural level generation (on the borders only), more than 900 lines in my talk file, 3 gotos, and again, a staggering 12 endings.

I'm pretty happy about it. It's my first LD, I went for a strange kind of games, content-driven, and still, it's done ! English isn't my mother tongue, so, sorry if there's oddities :)

Technical stuff :
- based on Curses, so no Windows version anytime soon. Sorry :(
- You'll need perl and the Curses package for it (either through CPAN or your OS). Just run Main.pl.
- Please don't peek in the code. It's rotten to the core.

Ratings

Coolness 2% 139
Overall 2.00 155
Community 2.17 123
Fun 2.40 116
Innovation 2.80 109

Feedback

skintkingle
23. Aug 2010 · 03:38 UTC
i wont vote as im on windows but you really have stabbed yourself in the foot by not having it on windows.
🎤 Henry Blank
23. Aug 2010 · 04:36 UTC
I know... But until a friend of mine tried to beta-test it, I thought Curses was portable. Dumb mistake.
Jamin
23. Aug 2010 · 20:55 UTC
I might be able to host the binary for people to play via a PuTTY session to a server... but first, I really want to know how the theme applies.
🎤 Henry Blank
24. Aug 2010 · 04:19 UTC
Sam Rodgers > Thanks, but I'm already working on it. It should be up (intermittently) soon, by telnet, once I get it to run properly.

The theme is about the pills. Instead of taking them and being dumbed down, you can put them to better use (but not every path have this option). I know it's loose, but I sort of lost focus when writing the story...
NiallM
29. Aug 2010 · 06:32 UTC
Just played this on my netbook (ubuntu). It's pretty good. The ascii graphics are effective and the story's well-told. I got endings 8 and 1 (which was seriously creepy btw) on my two playthroughs.
pekuja
29. Aug 2010 · 14:50 UTC
I like the conversation system. At first I wasn't sure what was going on, but I think I got the idea by the end, and then I played through it a couple more times. I couldn't figure out how to really affect the outcome though. For example, I expected taking or not taking the meds would have a significant effect on the ending, but I managed to get ending 10 on two tries where I did or didn't take them. I'm probably missing some significant options, but I was only able to get ending 10 and ending 11.
🎤 Henry Blank
30. Aug 2010 · 09:36 UTC
All the endings are determined on the beach, not before. Branching earlier would have been too long to make...

And sorry about the telnet server, but I'm not gonna be able to make it, I'm behind schedule at work :/
stqn
03. Sep 2010 · 10:17 UTC
Got this error at one point:
Use of "goto" to jump into a construct is deprecated at main.pl line 318.

Besides, I got it working by installing the perl-curses package on Arch Linux. I like the weirdness of it, but after playing to the end (once), I still don't quite understand who's saying what, nor where the theme comes into play. I might try once more...