IFComp09 reviews: Yon Astounding Castle! of some sort
"In this game... ye riddling gnome"
MONTFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORT
Arrrgh, argh argh argh argh argh.
If we're going to write in Ye Olde Butchered Englishe, could we maybe butcher it with a sharper cleaver?
- Your target for mimicry is Early Modern English, with maybe a few extra archaisms thrown in. We have lots of very good text in that dialect and it's all freely available. You don't have to get everything right as long as you get the feeling right. Hie ye to some primary sources and get that voice running in the back of your head.
- Not directed at the author here, but please, nobody ever make an IF in Middle English. The parser alone could probably achieve sentience and destroy humanity to deal with all the chaotic spelling.
- You should also learns to conjugates verbs; if you puts everything in the third person singular, it will drives everyone who reads it up Ye Olde Walle if they has even the most basic familiarity with the dialect, which everyone who's graduated from high school basically has achieves. (Seriously. See how annoying that is? "I" and all plurals use the basic verb stem, while thou gets -(e)st and he/she/it gets -(e)th. It's not hard to fake! The wiki article has a few more basic rules that make it read even more cleanly.)
- Furthermore, "yon" does not mean "a"; it means "that, except further away" and in fact survives to this day, somewhat in Modern English. (It's also similar to the Spanish aquél or the Japanese ano.) This means, among other things, that when you climb yon tree it stops being yon tree and starts being this tree. If you have climbed the tree, the tree is not, if you will, anymore located over yonder.
- This is less "you're doing it wrong" and more "this made me sad", but I'm including it anyway; the parser is familiar enough with the player that it's OK to thou them. Just remember that thou/thy/thee works like I/my/me and you're fine. Ye/your/you is also OK (which you did, except for using ye instead of you) but (a) it's less Ye Olde because it conjugates just like modern English, (b) it's kind of formal, and (c) if you are doing the Ye as in Ye Olde as well, where printers used 'y' because they didn't have 'þ' or 'ð', it produces a name collision. Especially since 'ye' as in second person formal/plural is pronounced as in "Hear Ye", as written, but "ye" as in "ye olde" is supposed to be pronounced with a voiced 'th' as in our modern 'the'. Sorting it out is work, and so we all win if you just thou us.
- A high point, though: older dialects of English were a whole lot freer with "-ship" and "-ful" and "un-" and "-like" and such, so your early inclusion of a chestnut tree standing nutfully in the courtyard was an excellent move.
Deep breath.
Butchery aside (though it was huge enough to damage my enjoyment significantly), this is a perfectly acceptable silly treasure hunt. Even the riddles were fair, except for the last one, which asks a trivia question about 20th century history and prefaces it with "Do ye know". The 20th Century won't be for hundreds of years; "NO" should totally have been acceptable answer.
Conclusion: If you can get past the butchery, sure, why not. It's better than Thy Dungeonman by a wide margin, and there is in fact a game here.