Edge Valley Bigfoot Society

There is a host of well-meaning, and actually quite wise, advice for first-time authors of parser games. This ranges from emphasizing the importance of beta-testing to coaching newcomers through the inevitably anxious process of releasing a game and getting public feedback, to far more granular pointers about implementation and technical challenges. But probably the biggest, most important single tip is to manage scope: you learn an enormous amount writing your first parser game, so there’s a major upside to keeping things relatively small and simple, minimizing the number of complex mechanics or branch-points in favor of getting a shipped game under your belt.

For all that this is rock-solid advice, though, many if not most parser newbies ignore it completely – they think they’re built different, they’ve got an idea, and by gum they’re going to reach for the stars. And you know, God bless those hubris-drunk rookies, among whose ranks I proudly count my younger self as well as the author of Edge Valley Bigfoot Society.

Sure, at first blush the game doesn’t seem crazily ambitious. The premise is classic parser-comedy stuff – you’re a sasquatch who’s been captured by a group of underachieving cryptid hunters, and you need to make your escape from their modestly-sized headquarters before so much time passes that the rest of your clan realizes that you were clumsy (and curious) enough to get caught and draw attention to them. The map has only maybe a dozen rooms, with a solid third of them being minimally-implemented transitional spaces. And the quickest route to an ending requires solving just three and a half relatively-simple puzzles.

Ah, but I said “an ending”, didn’t I? Yup, this sucker has six of them, with alternate solutions up the wazoo! And while many of the mechanics are standard medium-dry-goods affairs, at least one set of solutions I explored centered on the recondite ordering-NPCs-around mechanic, which is for real Inform heads only at this point. There aren’t any hints included so I didn’t manage to fully investigate everything on offer, but the game is deeper, with more simulationist elements, than it first appears.

Did it need to bite off as much as it does? …well, actually I’d say no, the straightforward puzzles are totally fine in themselves, with the quirky setting and enjoyably wry prose more than enough to carry the player through to the simplest ending. And at times I think the author was struggling to chew everything they had in their mouth: there are standard first-time Inform rough patches like line spacing errors, some confusion over scope, and a hesitance to extend build-in grammar (like, there’s a puzzle that should be solved via TAKE X WITH Y, but instead of allowing the parser to take an indirect object for that action, you just type TAKE X and the game checks whether you’ve got Y in your inventory and does the more complex action automatically if you do).

So yeah, there’s a hypothetical version of Edge Valley Bigfoot Society that trims its sails to eliminate all but one way through its puzzles, simplifies the implementation, and spends that time on polish instead. And that version would be a solid, fun game! But I much prefer the version we got; it’s only a little messier, but much more fun to mess around with – and, hopefully, more representative of what more the author might accomplish with a second parser game building on the lessons of making this first one, because it’s always a lot easier the next time out (see, that part of the advice is 100% correct).