Author's Comments
I thought some comments on the game might be interesting, at least to some people.
Those that find this sort of thing boring will hopefully not bother to link to
this page to begin with :-)
The game began as a coding exercise, hence the house. It is the dreaded 'code
your own apartment' except I thought that would be just a little too boring so
I changed it to 'code the perfect house.' Of course the house isn't perfect; about
half way through I decided to turn it into a game and there are many things in
a house that just don't fit well into a game. A working front door for instance
would have forced me to come up with some hardly believable reason that the player
didn't want to go for a walk around the estate. Also there are only two half baths
in the house and the entire second floor is made up of three rooms.
At any rate my house was now a game and I had to figure out some puzzles and a
plot of sorts if I was going to get anyone interested in playing it. The puzzles
were easy; I knew one of the problems people would have with my game is that it
is just too darned big so the obvious function of the puzzles would be to keep
the player out of some sections while others were being explored. This way the
huge thing could be taken in doses. It wasn't enough - I still got complaints
about it being too big. That's understandable though...there are a lot of useless
rooms. In fact I was told by the beta-testers that I should limit the library
to one room instead of nine but I just couldn't part with it once it was made.
Next time I'll probably listen better.
Most people that played the game mentioned that the plot seemed tacked on...those
that didn't mention this were generally of the opinion that there was no plot
at all. Either way it's fairly obvious I should have spent more time thinking
about a story line and less on scenery and such. Or rather I should have spent
more time on the game as a whole. If this game had stayed in the planning stages
for a week instead of an hour it would likely have had a quite compelling plot.
In truth I think all it really needed was a longer pre-house intro scene with
some player interaction and a similar change to the final scene. I doubt it would
have taken much to give this thing a true plot.
All told I'm quite happy with the results. I placed well within the top half of
the competition and learned an immeasurable amount about IF writing that could
not have been learned outside of IFcomp. I'm especially thankful for everyone
who took the time to write a review of Grayscale and I've tried to include them
all below. If you know of a review that I've missed please send it to me (ethwin
at cox dot net) and I'll add it to the page. BTW- These reviews are attributed
to whatever name was with them at the place I read them, if you wrote one and
want the name changed just e-mail me about it.
Reviews
Eric Mayer:
Daniel T. Freas, author of GRAYSCALE is right up front about it. He's not going
to tell you what you're supposed to be doing. That's for you to find out. It is
the first puzzle of the game, in essence. I proceeded to spend nearly half my
allotted two hours wandering the more than thirty locations easily accessible
to me, gathering objects, talking, reading books, examining things and never did
figure out what my goal was. The setting I traversed here was interesting enough
to keep me going, but I still don't like the common "figuring out the point of
it all" first puzzle. One of the most important things I've learned about writing
is that readers don't want to be kept in the dark for long - or any time at all.
Maybe it is the pernicious influence of short TV shows or non-stop action movies,
but it is a fact of life, in writing professional fiction, you've got about two
sentences to hook the reader. IF, I realize, is not regular fiction. It is certainly
entitled to have different conventions. But I happen to think it is a good policy
to get right into the story. Remember, there are well over 1,500 games just on
the Archive and never mind all the other things your potential player could be
doing, like watching TV, or reading a book. Funnily, the books in Grayscale's
library contain a few paragraphs from real books, so I may have to abandon this
idea I had for a game as liable to appear derivative. What I was thinking was
that it isn't very interesting to just walk from one location to another, even
if the door opens and shuts, and pick up some objects. But what if the coin, sword,
box etc were books? And what if I went over to the Guttenburg Project and downloaded
the full text of Moby Dick, Les Miserable etc and stuck them in between a bit
of code so you could open each book and read the whole thing? And what if, somewhere
in each book was hidden one of the clues you needed to find the ring of power?
Dan Shiovitz:
Grayscale (Daniel Freas): This game is much bigger than it should be. The setting
is mostly composed of unnecessary rooms and pithy quotations which mean nothing.
There's the fairly well-known guideline in IF writing that the game doesn't have
to implement every place in the setting, it just has to implement enough to suggest
the setting. And the problem is, even if you trimmed this down to a dozen rooms
or so, there's still not that much content. It's mostly wandering around in a
setting that doesn't really have any internal structure, and the puzzles aren't
really compelling enough to make it worth sticking around long enough to try and
figure out what's going on. This is made especially difficult by all the extra
rooms, since most of the stuff you encounter really is irrelevant, but there's,
eg, one quotation out of the dozen that matters. The implementation here is solid,
but I ended up feeling like the rest of the game was casually slapped together.
Craxton:
Grayscale (gryscale.gam) Rating: 8 Mysteriously transported to a castle, you must
uncover the secrets within with the help of a knowledgable but strangely immobile
woman. Very thorough implementation. Everything can be examined, and many things
may be interacted with, even those that need not be. Simple puzzles that occassionally
seem tacked-on, but ultimately tie together. Odd twist ending. Receives a 8 out
of 10 from Lord Craxton. Nicely done. ^_^
Valentine:
Grayscale Author: Daniel Freas Rating: 6 This game left me with mixed feelings.
On one hand, I liked the (very detailed) game world, parts of it just were beautiful;
I always liked games where the objective wasn't obvious from the very start, and
the player was encouraged to explore the game world to find it out. There was
a lot of optional material in the game - another feature I liked. The puzzles
weren't very hard for the most part; if not for the two hours limit, I think I'd
be able to solve the entire game without using the hints. Minor complaints: the
descriptions, while really good, weren't always very exciting; to my taste, there
were too many rooms that were just connections between other locations, without
anything interesting to do; and there were several minor bugs - inappropriate
responses for the most part. On the other hand, I didn't like the ending. It didn't
give me the feeling of everything sliding in place, all loose ends being tied
up, etc. - in short, it wasn't the kind of ending I felt such a game needed; it
was like a beautifully built house without a roof. I'd been thrown into a rather
strange place (not even knowing why), had had to perform lots of actions to escape
it - only to find out I'd been beta-testing something (this very game, as it seemed)...
It was just anticlimatic. That's too bad: a better ending would gain this work
a rating of at least 7.
Billy Harris:
Grayscale: (5) Another game with good, bad, and bugs. For some reason, the bugs
in Grayscale didn't bother me as much, even though one of them directly prevented
me from completing a puzzle. And it was nice to not have a limited inventory.
Limited inventories suck. I know real houses have lots of hallways and the rooms
need to be connected somehow, but it still took too long to get from place to
place. And I did have an unejoyable first 10 minutes wandering past locked doors
and empty hallways. Bug Report: [I left the rest of this review out since it
is mainly a list of bugs that have been corrected]
Paul O'Brian:
GREYSCALE by Daniel Freas There are some strange anomalies about Greyscale. Take
this, for instance: the game is centrally concerned with words, to the point of
scattering literary quotations all around, spending nine locations on a library
stocked with classic works, offering generous doses of original poetry (apparently
by the author), and throwing in for good measure another room whose puzzle revolves
around novel titles. Yet for all this concern with literature, Greyscale is shockingly
careless with its own prose. This is a game profusely littered with grammar errors
of every stripe. Run-on sentences are everywhere. In fact, punctuation in general
is a serious problem. Compound words lack hyphens. Commas are conspicuously absent,
except at the end of independent clauses, where they stand in for periods. We're
even treated to the ever-popular it's/its error. Given all these major weaknesses
in the game's writing, I struggled to give much credit to its literary pretensions
-- if you want me to think that you take language seriously, start with your own.
This contradiction isn't the only one in Greyscale. There are also some instances
of what I suppose I'd call "false advertising." For instance, the game's credits
text claims this: Finally, throughout the game you will undoubtedly come across
various writings. They have all been attributed to their authors in a fairly straight-forward
manner... Actually, not so much. There are some textual passages whose authors
are clearly marked, but then there are others that are only labeled with "S.C."
or some similar set of initials. If you're fairly well-read (or bored enough to
do a web search) you can probably determine what the initials stand for, but in
no way does that make them "fairly straight-forward" attributions. Okay, so that's
a minor quibble. For a more important example of such contradictions, observe
this suggestion in the game's info text: You may notice that when you start the
game you are given no obvious goal, but as you examine your surroundings and interact
with the game the goals and the story behind the game will become clear. Once
again, not so. I spent a good two hours with this game, and pretty much felt the
entire time like there was no particular plot, no real backstory, and that the
only goals I could discern were the typical goals of plotless IF: wander around,
pick up what's not nailed down, identify puzzles and try to solve them. There
were hints throughout of another narrative layer, and the ending confirms these
hints, but that's a far cry from what I'd call an actual story. In point of fact,
the majority of the game consists of wandering around the author's fantasy house.
How do I know it's the author's fantasy house? Simple: he embroidered his name
on the handtowels. All throughout the place are rich-dude features like marble,
seashell-shaped sinks, mahogany furniture, deep pile carpet, massive gardens,
statuary, and so on. The kitchen has a freaking stainless steel *floor*, for heaven's
sake. This idea is a few degrees off of the well-known and deeply-dreaded "here's
an implementation of my house" genre, but only a few. There are some puzzles,
at least, but they're not really original enough puzzles to compensate for the
poor writing, misleading claims, and the general vacuousness of the setting. It's
not that the game was particularly offensive, but it felt sloppy, empty, and lacking
in imagination. What I hope is that this practice run will enable the author's
next game to achieve a level of polished prose and compelling story that this
one just didn't quite reach. Rating: 4.3
Andrew Plotkin:
Grayscale Daniel T. Freas I didn't feel like I was given much of a goal, nor any
plot along the way. if this is a walk through the ocean of the author's soul,
about all I've learned is that I can't read his poetry. (I can't read most poetry.)
Good eye for scenery. Most of the puzzles... weren't solvable. By which I don't
mean they were impossible, or even hard. I mean that, if I lacked the solution,
I wasn't given anything that would lead me in the right direction. And if I had
a solution without a puzzle, I wasn't given anything that led me in that direction
either. A general lack of direction, is what I'm trying to get across here...
Spelling and grammar are somewhat weak. (It's easy to misspell "fluorine", but
to blow that and "iodine" both in the same sentence is a winner. :) Some doors
open automatically when you move through them; some don't. And it's not always
locked doors that stay closed and unlocked doors that open. I typed "unlock french
door" while holding the key, and it said "You can't reach the lock from this side
of the glass." Later I broke the glass and then typed "unlock french door with
key", and it said "The key doesn't seem to fit the lock." So I gave up. Turned
out that just "unlock french door" would have worked at that point. This was extremely
misleading. The game says it's impossible to get into an unwinnable state, but
that's not much comfort when you put on a mask, can't take it off, and die a few
turns later. There may be a way to get rid of it, but if the player doesn't know
how, it is an unwinnable state for that player, with all the attendant negative
consequences. (I.e., if the player hasn't saved, he's screwed.) For some reason,
I really like the fact that if you wander into the pine forest, you come out somewhere
randomly. Maybe it's just the Zorkness of it all. "get bars" hangs the game. [Now
*that* was a nasty bug! Strangely this is the only place it was mentioned, no
one else said a word. It's fixed now.]
Cedric Knight:
In “Grayscale” (5RW T) we have another anonymous and possibly amnesiac PC, this
time wandering around what at least represents a real architecture, a large house
and garden, doing things with keys and hidden passages. There is an NPC to dispense
most of the hints, but I drew some erroneous connections, trying to capture air
on the top of a windy cliff, for example. The conclusion briefly mentions some
background that partially explains the strange sequence of actions you have to
perform, but it is just as good to say that the context is the game itself. Also
notable is a room near the conclusion that is detailed but purely ornamental.
Niz:
Grayscale (5/10) A virtual-reality themed game.. but its no Matrix... Grayscale
seems to be attempting to do something clever (are you playing this game or beta-testing
it from the inside?) but unfortunately the implementation quality is not high
enough to enable this aspect to come out. There is a surprising number of simple
spelling mistakes (unusual for a game obsessed with poetry), puzzles are made
much more difficult than they should be because certain actions/verbs are not
available, and there is a very frustrating bug with the secret compartment, that
almost makes the game uncompletable.
Akilesh Ayyar:
Grayscale (6): Nice, simple map. I like it. I like the changing room description
when the sliding glass door is open. Poetry choices are nice, too. Sense of humor...
much appreciated A couple of typos... "kelly freas" must be asked about as "kellyfreas."
Interesting concepts... but the game was really too mundane. Could have done much
more with the potential conceptual material.
J.D. Berry:
Grayscale -- E I (2/5) I know I'm not supposed to know what's going on, but my
surroundings could be interesting. Establish a mood, an atmosphere, SOMETHING
that tells me I'm in for a unique experience or at least a pleasurable-if- familiar
ride. Strangely this world did make me feel, slightly, that I was there. S (2/5)
I felt comfortable with this author after reading the "info"--that although he
was a newer author, he had done his homework. I think this is a fair first effort,
which of course means there are improvements to be made. I hope this author learns
from ALL of the reviews posted, and takes heart. He has potential. A final frustration
with this game was when I uncovered a secret door. This should be cool, but it
led me to a location I already had visited. woo-hoo
Q B (3/3) I didn't see any. P (1/4) Occasional misspellings. Mostly decent prose
taken line by line, but it repeatedly failed to inject emotion or convey the story.
I did smile at the response to "kiss her". S (1/3) "The same as always." The first
game that doesn't do this will probably get undeserved bonus points from me! Is
"listen" not a default TADS command? It would be appropriate in this game, at
least. The library was skimpy and yet it occupied nine locations. I know it's
difficult to finish writing a game, but it feels like all of the effort went into
the "important" parts--the puzzles and integrating the locations. Rating: 4.5
J.T. Thomas:
_Greyscale_ Solid and well written, although perhaps a bit unimaginative at times.
Nicely rendered descriptions of the house and surrounding forest. Best description
of the game was of a snail on the bonsai tree, I still smile when I think of it.
Interesting story, but fractured, almost as if this was the first draft of what
could have become a very compelling game. I found some of the puzzles counter-intuitive
and out of place in the context of the narrative. Rating: 7