Zarf Updates

October's offering is Planetfall, Steve Meretzky's first title.

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license. In addition, I've posted high-resolution scans of the original folio manual and feelies.

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The package promises space comedy. Notice that the Infidel package refers to Planetfall as "Infocom's nuu SF laf klasic". And yes, Meretzky is a dab hand with a tension-breaking joke.

The mutants lap up the chemical, howling with delight. One immediately grows three new mouths.

But I'm not sure Planetfall can be described as a comedy. The mutants are about to tear you apart, after all.

The overall story is a carefully-graded arc. Tedium, then a shocking disaster (although the game doesn't narrate your shock or fear in any way); then the reveal of the abandoned, decaying facility that will be your new world. A lonely struggle to sustain yourself. The slow realization of the catastrophe which engulfed Resida and is now advancing through your body. Then hope and another tragedy -- this time acknowledged by the game! -- followed by a bang-up chase-scene ending.

The opening scene and the deliberately-saccharine final paragraph are played for laughs, but absolutely nothing else about Planetfall is. Even Floyd's reliable role as comic relief is background foil for those moments when he exhibits human grief and determination.

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This month's Visible app doesn't have too many fancy features. The big one is a Translation tab for Residan text. It's not necessary to play; the whole point is that Resida uses "logical" phonetic spelling, so you can read it with only a little bit of effort. Except that little bit adds up to a lot of annoyance, especially when you reach the library and its rapid-fire infodumps. Every time I've come back to Planetfall, I've said "Oh, sigh, the spelling." And so I offer you this handy alternative! Every time a Residan text scrolls by in the main pane, it's added to the Translation tab in standard English.

(No deep magic here. I just retyped them all by hand. It's under a hundred lines, only about 1200 words total.)

I have not attempted to provide cheat codes for the hunger, sleep, and disease timers in the game. I'm with Drew Cook on that issue: the survival elements of the game, and their increasing difficulty, provide the embodied grounding for the game's intensity.

(Yes, you have to take several runs and a deliberately optimization-minded approach to have any hope of winning. But that's every Infocom game. If that kind of mindset killed immersion, we wouldn't have gotten this far.)

Speaking of optimization, this is Infocom's first attempt to make action duration a meaningful game element. In most of the previous games, a turn was a turn. Deadline said that a turn was a minute, and gave you exactly 720 of them; but only a few "careful" actions took more than one minute.

Planetfall measures everything in millichrons. A Galactic day runs ten chrons; the status line thus shows the time of day from 0000 to 9999. Basic actions take seven millichrons -- roughly one minute, indeed. But many verbs set a longer duration: a WAIT is 40 millichrons. Furthermore (literally), the game map marks particular exits as taking specific amounts of time to traverse. A really long hall might take 160.

You might shrug this off as the same kind of fussy simulationism as the hunger timer. But, as far as I can tell, the durations are set for game balance rather than strict realism. For example, an elevator ride runs 50 or 100 millichrons, which is seven to fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes in an elevator is nonsensical. But it is a meaningful fraction of a game day. Two or three WAIT commands is enough to remind you that time's a-wastin'; better have all your chemicals in order before heading up that tower.

Really, the game day is highly compressed for gameplay purposes, just as it is in most modern graphical RPGs. "Ten chrons" is meant to express a certain amount of game experience, not 24 literal hours. And that's too many millichrons spent on that subject. I'll leave it there.

More reading:

• The Digital Antiquarian
• Drew Cook

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In other Visible Zorker news, I've added a "source code" link for every game. (See the project site and scroll down.)

The Visible Zorker apps have always included full syntax-colored ZIL code with commentary. But that's in a dynamic web app, which isn't the most convenient browsing format. These new links provide the same source code (and most of the same commentary) as plain static HTML.

You can of course also view the raw source code (and everything else related to the Visible Zorker) at Github.

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Upcoming work:

Visible Enchanter will be the next public release on November 1st. Magic! Terrible evils from the dawn of history! More magic!

Patreon supporters got access to Visible Enchanter a month ago, and Visible Infidel today. Please remember that the Visible Zorker is a Patreon-supported project! Your donation is immensely appreciated. (And credited in each game's "About" page, of course.)

Speaking of Infidel, I've discovered the most egregious memory bug in the game file. I bet you can't wait to hear about that. Details coming in a couple of days.