For this jam, I made Fathom Pond, a classic text adventure about finding your glasses in an increasingly surreal underwater world. And hiding in that description is perhaps the biggest error I've made in all of my 20+ jams: deciding to make a text adventure. However, before we get into that, let's start from the beginning.

Before the Jam

For this Ludum Dare, I knew I would be short on time before I even began. I've recently started a new job in which I work weekend mornings, and didn't bother taking time off for LD. This led to me considering some alternative options which would require a little less time than normal while still maintaining the level of scope I like to have in my jam games. Eventually, I landed on interactive fiction. I've been meaning to make a text adventure for quite some time, and this seemed like the perfect time to finally bite the bullet. I figured it would probably be a little more inaccessible than the average entry, but that I would have fun making it, and that it was worth the tradeoff. So off we go to Ludum Dare weekend.

A Brand New Engine

Fathom Pond was made in Inform 7, a natural language-based tool designed around the traditional style of text adventures (think Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork, etc.). It really is a great and deeply powerful tool, but it ended up being a bit more complex than I was prepared for. I had dabbled in the basics here and there, but had never actually made a full game this way, and ended up doing a lot of learning on the fly. This is nothing new for me, back in LD48 I opened Godot for the first time and ended up making depths of dreams, all things considered one of my better games. However, it does still present some struggles considering the time pressure I was under. Lots of functions that would be second nature to someone experienced in the tool took more time to sort out than I would have preferred, and I did start hitting some time snags near the end of Sunday. I finished everything I intended in time, but had a few major issues.

Immediate Reflection

As soon as I had submitted the game, I took a second to consider how the process had gone and what I wish I would have done differently. The big thing was the presence of a few pretty major bugs that hadn't come up in my testing but were found pretty immediately by non-LD playtesters. I would have liked to have gotten that feedback prior to the end of the jam, but the time ultimately didn't allow that to happen. The most major of these (one of which affected literally the final room in the game) were patched the next day, but a few minor-but-annoying ones still persisted. I was also a little nervous about the potential obscurity of many of the puzzles. Coming from an IF background they all seemed relatively doable to me, but I knew the majority of the players of the game wouldn't be as experienced in the genre as I am. This turned out to be a massive understatement, as we'll soon get to. However, ultimately, I was pretty happy with how it turned out! I thought all but the very final puzzles were really fun and interesting, and even now I'm shocked by just how much actual content I managed to squeeze into this given all of the constraints I've mentioned. Unfortunately, most of these puzzles were never cracked by the overwhelming majority of people.

The First Ratings

When I woke up the morning after the Jam had ended and people began rating games, I had 2 comments on the game page. Both of them were extremely lost and unable to progress beyond the first few rooms. Immediately I went into damage control mode, adding an additional disclaimer to the game page and additional helpful information (namely a common commands document and a full walkthrough) as attachments on Itch. I do think these were ultimately good additions, and mitigated the worst of the confusion, but it was still a rude awakening. Frankly, at this point I had done all I could do and just had to let the comments come in.

Complete Confusion

Most of the comments I received were ultimately pretty uninformative (good writing, but I got stuck). A couple people who explicitly mentioned they were text adventure fans mentioned they really enjoyed it and made some more substantial progress. However, there was an overwhelming opinion: pretty much everyone wanted in-game help. Whether this was just a list of possible commands, more specific hints in particularly challenging rooms, or more in-universe guidance from the NPCs, it would have gone a long way. Something like the Inform postcard is useful, but ultimately doesn't help with custom commands for this game like "lure" or "attach". I suppose in my mind simply trying things that could work is much of the point of playing a text adventure, and being given a list of commands would ruin a lot of the immersion and discovery of the experience. But this is also a Ludum Dare entry, which requires some level of mainstream appeal, and so it perhaps would have been more useful to include more explicit help.

One real missed opportunity is a lack of dialogue options from the Eel, an NPC accessible as soon as you enter the pond. He has dialogue relating to a few objects, but it's mostly funny and doesn't lead you in any particular direction. This would have probably struck the best balance between extra help and maintaining the total atmosphere. There was also a pretty big problem with some intended actions not being recognized by the parser. The most egregious example is in the altar, where "place" doesn't work but "put" does. While experimentation with phrases is at the core of IF, intending the right thing but the specific phrasing not being recognized is a pretty major issue.

The Good

Not everything was bad! Those who did make more significant progress said they found the puzzles really engaging and well designed, and the sheer amount of content was very impressive given the compo restrictions. This is one of the things I'm most proud of with the game as well, I have 8 major puzzles in the game and none of them are repeats. Given the relatively limited number of puzzle options in the genre, coming up with novel ideas was tricky but super satisfying.

There was also pretty much universal praise for the writing. I don't tend to get much space to showcase my writing within my jam entries given the nature of compo scope, so having an opportunity to make a game that fully showcased the way I could create mood was really exciting for me. I loved designing this weird, surreal underwater world, and was thrilled by the number of narrative twists and turns I could sneak in without really having an explicit story. Ending the game inside a giant kraken in pitch darkness is a particular highlight.

Results

There ultimately isn't much to say about the final results. They're some of my lowest scores in a while, and I fully expected that going in. This was never going to be one of my best performing games, and I had to accept that before I even started working on it. I am still very proud of my Mood score, considering that was probably the aspect I was targeting the hardest. A complete lack of graphics and audio probably also skewed my scores, but I didn't have much choice in the matter. There are ways to add them to Inform projects, but it's not supported by every interpreter and was just generally more trouble than it was worth. Basically, I did just about exactly as well as I was expecting.

What Next?

I've begun to notice a pretty distinct dichotomy within my Ludum Dare entries. Either I make a game that scores well, or I make a game that I find more enjoyable to create. I've had a few jams where this overlapped, but for the most part it's one or the other. Stork Serenity is still my best scoring LD entry, but it was a pretty mechanically plain game to work on. On the other hand, my most recent games, Gull and Ray and Fathom Pond, were much more mechanically interesting and fun to make, but were inaccessible and didn't score particularly well. There definitely is a balance to find here, but I still appreciate making something like Fathom Pond every once in a while. If I just made the kinds of games I think would score well, I would have burnt out of LD a long time ago. We'll see if I strike a better balance for my 20th(!) Ludum Dare this October.