I finished my run-through of Accursed Crown of the Giant King: Chapter 2 “The Duchy of Despair”. Things went pretty smoothly; found a couple of minor bugs, and more than a couple of typos, but nothing major. I’ve got to say, chapter 2 is pretty fun!
On to chapter 3!
In parallel I’m working on chapter 3, making steady progress.
The Accursed Crown of the Giant King is an old school role-playing game, single player, party based. It will be released in 2021 for Windows, Mac, and iOS. ACotGK is by Merry Prankster Games, and you can get more information at https://prankster.com/acotgk.
For the past few months I’ve been working on a frustrating bug with In-App Purchases in Accursed Crown of the Giant King. It hasn’t been urgent to track down since no one is purchasing anything until the game is released (or at least beta), but still something eating up attention.
So, for testing IAP, you work in something that Apple calls the “sandbox”. You make up fake user accounts, and they can make purchases and downloads of unreleased IAPs, without having to pay real money. Very convenient!
In the sandbox, iOS IAP works great! However, with the same exact code, and same exact IAP, the download fails on MacOS. Here’s a screenshot of the download hung at 80%:
I got in touch with Apple Developer support, but they were not able to track down the issue. I wonder that no one else is running is running into the issue, and thus not a priority for Apple. So I don’t really know whether I have done something wrong, or this is a sandbox-only artifact, or a real issue with IAP downloads on MacOS.
In any case, I’ve wasted enough time on this. I’m just going to change the way IAP works in ACotGK, such that the download is unnecessary. I’ll just download all of the chapter files with the main app download, but only unlock them upon a successful IAP (with no download at all). Not the most secure solution, but I’m not really putting much effort into defeating piracy in any case.
The Accursed Crown of the Giant King is an old school role-playing game, single player, party based. I must sadly announce that it will be released in 2021 for Windows, Mac, and iOS. I was hoping for 2020 but with just 3 months to go, I’m not quite there. ACotGK is by Merry Prankster Games, and you can get more information at https://prankster.com/acotgk.
Here is a video of my playtesting through chapter 2. In this play, the party explores the Annuncius Inn, resting, picking up new quests, and meeting a new potential companion.
In the meantime I’m working on chapters 3 and 4. Look for another video soon!
Found a “neat” bug today, replaying Chapter 1 for testing purposes. Here’s what happens. The party enters the final fortress for Chapter 1, and is presented with a locked door in front of them:
Fortress entrance.
On clicking on the locked door, “You need the Bagduul key to unlock this door.” Not remembering the exact details, I figured I had missed the key somewhere, so I went through the previous few areas looking for the key. Nowhere to be found!
So, I went back to the source code. You are supposed to get the Bagduul key from the big boss of Chapter 1. Then, you can open the treasure room (using the key), where you get your well deserved reward. But, in this case, the treasure room was spawned as the very first room in the fortress, so you couldn’t get to the boss to get the key in the first place. Oops!
My first fix was to make sure the treasure room wouldn’t get spawned as the first room in the dungeon. But then I had a thought, borne out by some testing. The treasure room could still get spawned as the room right _before_ the boss room, again blocking access to the key need to access the treasure room. Oops again!
At least I thought of this before it caused more problems. The fix I settled on was to move the treasure room to an attic, a mini-level upstairs from the main level. The locked door is then on a completely separate level, and can’t possibly block access to the boss.
This does show one of the drawbacks to procedurally generated levels. Just because the level generation code makes a good level once, doesn’t mean it always does. As a coder, I need to make sure to test things in as thorough a manner as possible, and also keep the levels (and quest logic) relatively simple so there aren’t so many ways to screw it up.
Up this time, “The Witness”, one of the earlier Infocom games, the second in their detective mystery games (following Deadline).
The good:
The writing and atmosphere. Detective noir fiction, but in adventure game form!
The mystery. No spoilers here, but I thought the overall mystery made sense, had twists and turns (but not ridiculous), logical, and ultimately fairly satisfactory in conclusion.
Contained location. Usually I make a map for Infocom games, but this time I just never got around to it, because I didn’t need to. The location, small for an Infocom game, was straightforward, and I quickly internalized where everything was.
The bad:
Mystery as text adventure. I disagree with many of the reviews I’ve seen; I don’t think the “whodunnit” mystery worked well in the text adventure format. In particular, the interaction of the “figure something out” mechanic with the “save/restore” mechanic. I’ll give an example. Part of successfully completing the adventure is to determine the motive of the murderer. I managed to do that, but on completion of the game, I was informed that I hadn’t adequately figured out the motive. I restored and went back through, trying all sorts of new things with no success. Eventually, I went to Invisiclues, and realized I had solved the motive properly, I just hadn’t done it in the particular save game that I took to completion. I found this obtuse and frustrating.
Human characters. Infocom games don’t deal well with human characters; people are just too complex and creative to fit well into the strictures of a text adventure. Communicating with them becomes an exercise in frustration as you try to determine just the right way to ask them about something they might not even be programmed to know anything about. You can argue whether this is due to the technical limitations of the early text adventures (128K of memory, I believe), or whether it is just too hard to program realistic humans. But in either case, I find that humans in Infocom games only work well when they have a very limited and obvious role. In this case, you have full conversational access to a number of human actors, and it doesn’t work for me.
Puzzle frustration: Low. I was generally able to figure out the mystery and what was going on. My frustrations were more with getting the game to recognize what I already knew. I did refer to Invisiclues several times, but I generally came away with, “I already knew that!”
This is my least favorite Infocom game thus far; t just didn’t work for me. Other reviewers have different opinions, so this might just the limitation of me, playing this game 40 years out. Jimmy Maher review the game here: https://www.filfre.net/2013/03/the-witness/
I’m not sure what I’ll play next, but I’m going to try to get to it before years have passed.
The Accursed Crown of the Giant King is an old school role-playing game, single player, party based. It will be released in 2020 for Windows, Mac, and iOS. ACotGK is by Merry Prankster Games, and you can get more information at https://prankster.com/acotgk.
As well as developing Chapter 3, I’m going back and playing the previous chapters for testing. In this video, the party explores the Main Hall of Thoroneth.
Chapter 3 is almost winnable, though there are a _lot_ of details to go back and fill in.
The Accursed Crown of the Giant King is an old school role-playing game, single player, party based. It will be released in 2020 for Windows, Mac, and iOS. ACotGK is by Merry Prankster Games, and you can get more information at https://prankster.com/acotgk.
Here is the first video of ACotGK running on iPad! Last video I had iPhone working, now iPad. I also tried using iMovie to put together the video; it worked pretty well.
The Accursed Crown of the Giant King is an old school role-playing game, single player, party based. It will be released in 2020 for Windows, Mac, and iOS. ACotGK is by Merry Prankster Games, and you can get more information at https://prankster.com/acotgk.
Here is the first video of ACotGK running on iPhone! My previous game, Temple of the Abyssal Winds, supported the iPhone, but I had to do various porting and updating to get the new one up and going.
ACotGK: iPhone
In the next few weeks I’ll be testing Chapter 2 and starting dev on Chapter 3.
