python game

This game was entered into the recent 2022 Parsercomp.

This is a python game. When it begins, it has a neat little loading animation, then gives you a list of commands.

Gameplay consists of fighting, where you can attack or run away, plus eating to regain health and trading.

There are only a few simple encounters and locations, so it seems like most of the work went into the system. These kind of things are pretty hard to program, so I imagine that the author found it enjoyable to wrestle out how to program all the different activities.

Unfortunately, most of the work recreated things which were done before in other languages, and so from a player standpoint there's not a lot here that's new or exciting.
-Polish: The game is a bit buggy and could use more disambiguation and error messages.
-Descriptiveness: The game is fairly sparse
-Interactivity: It was a bit hard to figure out what to do
-Emotional impact: It doesn't seem designed for that.
-Would I play again? Probably not.

In this game, you can fight a wolf or a bear. During the tutorial, you fight the wolf, and then the bear. You can't defeat the bear in the tutorial, so you must run (or lose the fight).

At that point, the game lets you "nap" in one of two locations, the field or the forest. If you nap in the field, you have a random chance of meeting a trader. If you nap in the forest, well, the game is then supposed to give you a random chance of meeting a trader or fighting a wolf or bear, but, in fact, you'll only meet a trader.

This game is distributed as Python source code, allowing me to read the code to debug it.

The problem lies in the "random_events" function in Handler.py. It computes a max value "a" (for example, a=9), then computes a random value "b" from 0 to "a", as if rolling a die with 9 sides. The game then never uses the random variable "b", but instead uses the variable "a", as if the player had always rolled the maximum value on the die. As a result, the player only ever meets the trader, regardless of whether you nap in the field or forest.

This was all preventable if the author had followed common-sense guidelines, such as the IFComp guidelines for authors. https://ifcomp.org/about/guidelines

The guidelines there say to playtest your game and to credit your beta testers. But the "credits" command (which only works when you're not in combat or trading) credits only the author, and no beta testers. I think that if anyone had beta tested this game, they would have discovered this bug, and the author would have fixed it before now.

Furthermore, the guidelines recommend using an IF authoring tool like Inform or TADS, and not to implement your own parser implementation in Python. Distributing the game as Python made it unnecessarily difficult to play.

Finally, upon reviewing the code, I see that there's no way to "win" the game. Even if the randomizer bug is fixed, at best, you might fight the bear, drink a few health potions, and win the fight, but you just get a few more units of meat, bone, and fang from winning. The more experience points you earn, the higher your "level" is, but leveling up doesn't do anything.

There should be a way to win the game. Perhaps the game might end saying "you win!" when you defeat the bear. Ideally, there would even be some kind of story, giving me a reason to fight wolves and bears.

Points for truth in advertising: this is a game, kind of, in Python, certainly, and the low-effort approach to naming – and capitalization, for that matter – carries through to the three minutes or so of content here (well, quintuple that if you don’t already have Python installed and need to wrestle with setup). Upon starting the game, you’re greeted with a dense list of commands, then dumped into a tutorial where you (who are you?) are fighting a wolf; in a battle of your fists against the wolf’s claws, you appear to be guaranteed of victory.

I admittedly have never attempted to punch a wolf, but I have read the anticlimactic last chapter of Robinson Crusoe where he gets jumped by starving wolves in the Pyrenees, and based on what I learned there this seems unlikely to work.

(Also: Robinson Crusoe is way weirder than you think. There are also two sequels; in the first sequel he goes to Siberia, and the second is a book of metaphysical essays. One neat thing about novels in the 18th Century is authors hadn’t figured out how they were supposed to work. See also Tristram Shandy).

(And why yes, I’m grasping for things to talk about that are more interesting than python game).

(Seriously, read Tristram Shandy, it’s hilarious).

But so anyway you win the tutorial fight against the wolf, then you fight a bear, and the tutorial warns you to run (I have also not attempted to punch a bear, but this time my intuition and the author’s appear to align in terms of the likelihood of a positive result when boxing wild animals). If you do, you encounter a trader, who’ll let you swap assorted wolf bits for coins, and then for health potions. And with that introduction done, you’re now set loose into the game’s wide world!

The game’s wide world consists of two locations, which appear to be interchangeable, to the extent that all you can do in either is nap until another trader comes along. Per Dan Fabulich’s review, this is because there’s a bug, and napping should also fire off a risk of a random encounter with another wolf or another bear. But there’s no additional content beyond that, even were that bug to be fixed, no progression or ending or plot or anything else. Just a man punching a wolf, forever.

I don’t want to punch a wolf.

I don’t want to punch a bear.

I don’t want to play python game.

Look, I hate to be negative – I try to be a positive person, for my own sake and that of others! But this is a half-completed programming exercise – maybe eventually, after a lot of work, it could provide the skeleton for a worthwhile experience, but the game’s clearly nowhere near that yet. I will say, this did have the easiest launching process of any bit of Python IF I’ve played, so that’s not nothing, and hopefully the author’s decision to enter this into ParserComp bespeaks a desire to get public feedback on a work in progress. But after getting that feedback, I hope they figure out how to incorporate it into a game that does something singular or unique or personal, so that the generic title “python game” will no longer feel so apt.