I played KQ6 as a small kid who could barely speak English, and again ~10 years later as a grad student. The day I stumbled on the long ending and found myself in the Realm of the Dead still counts as one of the most mind-explodey things that ever happened to me.
I'm a native English speaker, but I was a young kid as well and so I remember learning a lot of the puns and wordplay in English much later on in life after first seeing them in that game. I'm sure another playthrough would reveal even more.
"Stick in the mud", "Wallflower", those sorts of thing.
The volcano at the end of Leisure Suit Larry 2. The elevator door opening after you drop your bomb into the crater is handled in the PIC, not in the room script. So the game ending condition is essentially invisible if all you look at is the scripts.
Also in LSL2, nothing in the script tells you that you can't dodge the KGB agents on the beach by walking around them.
Yeah so here's the chaining, I went back to look at it.
The door is a sprite, declared in the VIEW, that is in the way of the strip of elevator shaft (declared in the PIC) that you have to step on in order to exit from the volcano (room 82) to room 83, which is the beginning of the endgame.
If you just look at the script, the fact that you can't just walk into the shaft is not visible. Once you've caused the explosion, all that happens is that a variable is set called causedEruption, and the door animation happens. Nothing else other than a look message uses the value of causedEruption in the script. So before we added in the VIEW and PIC files, the engine thought that the endgame was free once you stepped onto the volcano crater.
The PIC file is what tells you that that strip of the screen matters (it's the exit), and the VIEW file is what tells you that the door (a sprite) initially blocks access to it, and once it becomes open allows access to it.
So the engine had to look at the VIEW and PIC to deduce that causedEruption was the flag that mattered, which meant that the items you have to use to cause said explosion were needed for the endgame.
Thanks! No, this needs your own copy of the game, like eg ScummVM does. You run the tool on it and then you can point ScummVM/DOSBox to the patched directory.
True, but it looks for me like a tool that can generate a „nice“ path for every game. The path is true for every instance of the same game. If the path is done once, everyone can benefit from it. So a patch would not bundle copyrighted material, only the changes made from your tool that anyone else would end up with anyway. It is just a convenience thing. One would need the path, not running your tool over and over again for everyone wanting to play the sane version of the game.
Maybe don't feel entitled to the author's time? Perhaps he'd rather spend time playing the games that the software patched, instead of spending time doing writing for you.
parsers are easy... provided you know exactly what you're trying to parse. Knowing what to parse and how to parse it is the vast majority of the work. And playtesting is also not "making this". It's "this didn't work... please do the work for me again"
Thanks!! I mean, I can kiiiinda see it as a design philosophy... It does make games harder and make them feel higher stakes. What really gets me is some of the later games that look like they would be safe, but aren't. For example Gabriel Knight 1 has a day structure that looks like it would prevent you from getting stuck... but it doesn't, you can trigger a day's end without getting everything you actually need. That's just, like, evil haha
Yes I'm with you on that bridle! And you can only get it by typing "look down", which is infuriating! I'm also discovering, working on KQ5, that it is really evil in allowing you to use items in certain ways that look fine at first (the action succeeds), but bite you in the butt later because you needed that item for something else and there was an other option you could have used. For example, throwing the leg of lamb at the cat to chase it away will work... but then good luck surviving the mountains. I love these games but MAN.
In KQ6, the patched game prevents you from returning to the Labyrinth entrance unless you hold everything you need for inside. Stepping on the mountain will just not work. So you can save inside... you should be "safe" at that point (as safe as you can ever be in a Sierra game, lol).
> In KQ6, the patched game prevents you from returning to the Labyrinth entrance unless you hold everything you need for inside. Stepping on the mountain will just not work
Nice~
> throwing the leg of lamb at the cat to chase it away will work... but then good luck surviving the mountains.
Agree! Some of the KQs will even give you a few points (not the maximum, since it’s not the optimal action) for doing something that’s considered “good,” even though it puts the game into an unwinnable state later on.
I'm a female software engineer. I'm pretty successful, but I have often felt that I don't fit in and I've had to learn to deal with that.
I feel isolated and lonely when there is a group that has a common narrative and set of assumptions that I don't fit. These come out in general statements, assumptions, and/or jokes. Then I have to decide whether to hide my own preferences (lying by omission), get into an argument, or change my preferences. All three options are exhausting and take energy away from actually doing work.
Examples:
* Generalizations about "real haxx0rs": "programmers have side projects", "programmers use [operating system of choice]", "programmers heavily customize their editor", "programmers can't get a girlfriend/are introverted/socially maladapted", "programmers don't care about their clothes", "programmers don't wear a tie", etc.
* Disproportionately caring about one set of users/customers which resembles the team. Example: spending a lot of time talking about/fixing the experience of male users when the vast majority of users are female (and the product is not mature yet); making fun of users and their silly ways when the majority of users are female and/or non-technical and/or young and/or old and/or not from cosmopolitan areas, etc.
* Having to have a conversational style that's significantly more aggressive than what is natural for me in order not to get left out of conversations. I have to be comfortable cutting people off in meetings and jumping on the ends of sentences. I've learned to do it but it's pretty exhausting, and takes energy away from actually doing work. Also, having to jump verbal cues gives me a feeling of insecurity about people not caring what I have to say unless I shove it down their throat, even when that is obviously not the case (because my input is well-received).
As a manager/CEO, here are a few things you can do to help:
* Allow hires to be vetoed on the basis of not having an inclusive worldview, regardless of their professional ability. You can ask "tell me of a time when" type questions to suss that out. Eg, "tell me of a time when you had to convey a complicated technical point across to a non-technical customer (or team)", and watch for denigrating statements. I've given product manager candidates hypothetical products to design for a very particular audience, and anyone who made excessive fun of the intended audience was a no hire.
* Enforce civil conversational standards around the workplace, ie no off-color jokes, talking down to customers, empty generalizations, etc. I don't mean sending around HR videos on what not to say, I mean simple statements like "That's not funny, and offensive" (said flatly), "This customer pays us $X" or "That's not how we're going to improve our conversion rate", etc.
* Encourage open and written discussion of issues, eg via bugs, written code buddies/reviews, etc. Have anyone be able to veto a commit (with good reason), or reopen a bug. Having the bulk of these discussions in writing can help shy/non-confrontational people have their say. Having a focus on getting things done, and getting them done right, vs how exactly they get done can also help people feel more at ease.
* Pay close attention in group discussions to see if anyone is chronically unable to finish their thought without being shut down or talked over by someone else. If their thoughts have merit, be their advocate and calmly say something like "I'd like to hear X finish their thought". Say it as often as necessary. Then encourage other people to say it for you, when necessary.
Aside from all of this, as an early startup employee I've been mistaken for the admin, and as a consultant I've been in situations where people assumed at first sight that I was dumb, not technical at all, had not programmed for long, and more generally was less competent than others. If these prejudices survived one conversation they were generally a sign that the company was pretty fucked up and that much more was wrong with it.
