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The Mary Jane of Tomorrow

by Emily Short profile

Fanfic
2016

(based on 21 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

You, Mary Jane Minsky, have a few things to clear up with your best friend Jenny Yoshida. When your robotic birthday gift doesn't go over as planned, you may need to reset your expectations, for her and yourself.

The Mary Jane of Tomorrow was written by Emily Short as a prize for Steph Cherrywell, who won IF Comp 2015 with Brain Guzzlers from Beyond! The Mary Jane of Tomorrow is set a little while after the events of Brain Guzzlers, making use of Steph’s setting and characters with permission.

This is a lightly puzzly parser game with substantial procedural text components.


Game Details


Awards

Nominee, Best Puzzles; Winner, Best Individual Puzzle; Winner, Best Individual NPC; Nominee, Best Implementation; Nominee, Best Use of Innovation - 2016 XYZZY Awards

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
An intricate mid-length AI-training game with proc gen content, June 5, 2016
by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 1 hour

This game was created by Emily Short as a prize for IFComp, resulting in a game set in Steph Cherrywell's world of Canyonville from Brain Guzzlers From Beyond.

You are Mary Jane, creating a robot for your friend Jenny. You have to train your robot to become just like Jenny. You train it by having it read books in your lab on different topics. However, some books have negative side effects, so it becomes quite the puzzle to figure out what books to read and when.

The major innovation in this game is the use of procedural generation for your conversations with the robot. The robots conversation is affected by numerous variables affecting its emotion, tone, and knowledge. A large corpus is included in the source code, allowing for huge variety. This represents an immense accomplishment, and provides proc gen that is actually fun to read.

This game took me about 45 minutes to finish without hints. I restarted several times, but I don't think you ever need to.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Train a robot with ridiculous material, January 6, 2023
by Lance Cirone (Backwater, Vermont)

The Mary Jane of Tomorrow has a cute, low-stakes story with a really creative core mechanic: procedurally generated text. You're training a robot called the Pine Nut Queen, and it learns from various books and texts you feed it from around the house. Its dialogue and responses change according depending on what it has learned. Your main goal is to make sure it'll correctly respond to the questions Jenny is going to ask it, but in the process of getting there, you'll teach it all kinds of stuff. The implementation of this is seamless, and resulted in some really funny messages. The puzzles are pretty simple, but still enjoyable.

Also, this game is set in the same universe as Brain Guzzlers from Beyond! While I've now beaten both, I played this game before Brain Guzzlers. I still enjoyed it, so don't let that scare you away -- from what I remember, it doesn't connect to the specific events of Brain Guzzlers, and just involves the some of the same characters.

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The Mary Jane of Tomorrow on IFDB

Recommended Lists

The Mary Jane of Tomorrow appears in the following Recommended Lists:

Favorite "atmosphere" games by MathBrush
These are games that are fun because of the atmosphere and plot more than the puzzles. These games are not too hard and not too easy. They generally have a big over-arching theme. I have included most horror and comedy games in other...

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the hottest games I've played. in progress (I will make changes). all these games are special to me in one way or another. have fun besties :^)

Polls

The following polls include votes for The Mary Jane of Tomorrow:

Games with Toys by IFforL2
I want to distinguish toys from three other IF game elements: Puzzles require the player to find a solution to a problem in the narrative. If she can't find a solution, she's stuck. Branching allows the player to steer the plot of the...

The Best Games of 1st Half of 2016 by Anya Johanna DeNiro
Sometimes by the end of the year and after the Comp it's hard to keep front-and-center the games that appeared earlier in the year! Here is a place to list what has tickled your fancy so far. One vote per game only please.

Great games that consist of a single puzzle by Spike
I'm looking for well-designed and challenging games that revolve around solving a single puzzle. The puzzle may have multiple parts, but the whole game needs to be essentially about solving that single puzzle.

See all polls with votes for this game




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