Spring Thing 2012: The Egg and the Newbie

This is a review for an entry in the Interactive Fiction Spring Thing competition 2012.

This is the first chapter of long alternate-history science fiction saga in which the Tesla Corporation took control of the USA in the early twentieth-century, inventing wireless electricity and teleporation in the process. It's also a chicken farm time management game. These two things do not go together. At all. 

I commend the clever implementation of a Farmville clone as a text adventure, and indeed the author has taken care to provide a neat balance between challenge and accessibility. The player is required to raise $1000 dollars, within a time-limit, through the process of buying chickens and selling their eggs, ensuring supplies of chickenfeed and water are kept topped up while dealing with random coyote attacks, killing your chickens and damaging the fence. Initial playthroughs will invariably lead to failure at the end of the time limit, as veteran text adventurers have been trained to explore all locations thoroughly, examining and experimenting with everything. The time limit ensures that this is entirely the wrong approach. This is not a game designed for completion on the first playthrough, and with some practice you should be able to comfortably find the optimized, streamlined route to success. 

So an interesting coding exercise, which seems to have achieved its goals. But are those goals worthwhile? Is there any reason to want to play a text-based farm-themed Diner Dash? This is a genre that is ideally suited to graphical form. Three mouse-clicks would be sufficient to complete the primary player actions: collecting the eggs from the coop and selling them in the buy/sell room. As a text adventure, this is more than ten individual commands, not including spelling mistakes and incorrectly compass directions. Sure, there is an optional "ZAP" command to jump from one room to another, but it doesn't eliminate the tedious typing that acts as a road-block to the player rather than enhancing the experience. 

Meanwhile, there is this Tesla Corporation thing, presumably the main focus of the "Heartha Saga". They are engaged in some kind of industrial espionage with the rival Tearth Corporation, and have hand-picked you for a dangerous mission that will pit you against a fearsome enemy, your life and your wits will constantly be in peril, friend will turn out be foe and vice versa, all against the backdrop of a stunning alternate world gone mad! Or, they could, you know, just send you to some backwoods chicken farm to sell eggs. This is exactly the wrong way to set up a "Chapter 1" of a long-running saga. As an introductory "teaser trailer", the key highlights of the saga need to be sold to me from the very beginning: Who are the chief protagonists? What is the conflict about? How and why is the player-character important it all? These should be clear from the end of Chapter 1 if the author wants players to look forward to Chapter 2. Instead, its a series of text dumps about Tesla-world, which is then promptly ignored as we go to play Farmville with some technobabble flavour-text for a while, The End.