I have some fairly specific design goals I intend to explore in my IF “adventures”. Some of them can be seen in my first (and, so far, only) game spondre. That game not only gave me my first experience trying to realize these, it showed me some problems that need to be addressed. Not all of them are easily solvable. But you have to start somewhere!

If you don’t fail at least 90 percent of the time, you’re not aiming high enough. – Alan Kay

First, and not surprisingly, I want the game to be responsive. I don’t mean that just in the sense that you will get a response to your input. That goes without saying. What I mean is that the game should respond dynamically to not only what you are doing but to what you have done in the past. (Wouldn’t it be something if it could respond as well to what you might be about to do in the future?)

Now that’s not unheard of in games, even IF games, but it’s also not unheard of in IF games where, if you provide the same input, even after having advanced the game, you get the same response. To me, that just feels robotic.

Ideally, the game should respond as if it were someone there with you. This isn’t going to be Turing Test stuff, but the responses should make it feel that the game is in some form a conversation with you.

To that extent, I see a certain amount of AI involved in this, not just as far as any in-game characters are concerned but the overall game experience as well. All the text you see should have some sort of intelligence behind (with “intelligence” in quotes, of course) as much as possible and necessary.

I guess what I mean is, I want there to be a unified experience. Just as each of our brain cells is a part of a larger brain, and just as each of us in turn is part of a larger realization which is the collective activity of all of us together, all the elements of a game – rooms (if any), characters, plot, events, etc – are just parts of the combined, collective game. In other words, the game itself could be a considered a collective “non-player character”, working both with and against you to create a resulting story unique to you, using components of itself along the way.

A single “mind” instead of a disparate group of individual ones.

Hopefully, when I read this again in a month or two, it won’t seem like gibberish!