My Part is Finished

I finished the rough draft of my internet fiction game affectionately titled Bomb Squad.  I am very pleased with my finished product until someone tries to use it tomorrow and messes everything up.  That's okay, half the battle is preparing yourself for the shock of a flawed program, I hope.

The game now has a grand total of 31 objects in one room according to Inform 7.  I believe about fifteen of those are my dummy objects, while the other half are either useful objects in plain sight or hidden.  Given a little more time and energy, I would get real creative with the game and make several red herrings instead of just having dummy objects.  A red herring would lead you down the wrong path for three or four turns, wasting more precious time than a dummy object, which is one or two turns and then finished.  Sadly, I ran out of ideas for nonsensical items to put in the lobby.

This leads me to the other part of what I accomplished today.  While I overloaded the room with objects, the game has lost a large portion of its realism for my trademark cynical humor.  A lot of the descriptions for the objects may or may not make sense to the player, but I tried to make them funny.  As a whole, I think the game is more interactive than it was two weeks ago.  It lacks consistent tone, but I think has something that will speak to the player.

And if it does, I have created a survey for my usability testers.  I know that we aren't supposed to rely on our classmates for the bulk of our testing, but I had no one to test it at home, so I will need to conduct tests in class tomorrow, and hopefully the survey will give me a little bit of an edge.

The one thing that I do wish I knew how to do is publish the game online and draw just general, unsolicited criticism.  If anyone could help with that, it would be greatly appreciated.

I am excited to see how Bomb Squad holds up. This was the only final project of the semester that was bearable to work with.