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Lenses - a thing unheard of in the Kingdom of Aquitania
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How
did you work out the feelies and goodies that came with the
game?
Again -- I'm sorry about this -- I can remember nothing of
the process. I suppose as usual with these things we all sat
around and ideas just came up. Or perhaps I just made them up
on my own. Haven't a clue at this remove, I'm afraid.
Well,
there was an issue of "The Independent Guardian" with
all those hilarious photographs ...
Oh, that was easy. Just a version of what we called "rags"
in Punch. The pix came from the Punch library and we just dropped
them in. I don't think we had scanners or anything like that.
Rob
Steggles said that, from where he was sitting "Jinxter",
although being an excellent game, didn't perform too well financially,
because it had too large a team working on it. Do you remember
"Jinxter" being a troubled production?
No. I came in very late and I was working against a mad deadline
and too much taken up with Anita to really pay much attention
to any tensions there may have been. Rob Steggles's memory is
undoubtedly far more accurate than mine.
They
may have resented this parvenu coming in and rewriting the thing
at the last minute but they were all too polite to say so and
in any case, the Magnetic Scrolls system made it all much easier
than it would have been were it an Infocom game (though that
doesn't mean it was easy; just easiER).
To
explain why would involve a detailed explanation of the Magnetic
Scrolls vs. the Infocom systems which we don't have time for
and I'm not qualified to give. Let's just say that Magnetic
Scrolls used a data-driven model rather than a text-driven one,
which means, utterly simplistically, that if something was soft
in the Infocom system, it was so because you described it as
so. In the Magnetic Scrolls system, there was -- I mean this
conceptually -- something called SoftBit and if SoftBit=1 then
the thing was soft, whether it was a marshmallow or a feather
cushion, and the system "knew" about the properties
and behaviour of soft things in general. So the descriptive
layer which the player actually sees is really rather less important
(or perhaps I mean significant) than the underlying data structure,
which were all in place.
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