Headlights is a parser-based work by Jordan White entered into IFcomp 2022. It was created with Perplexity.
The action in Headlights consists of looking at everything to find items that can open new locations. It relies on an artificial sense of urgency, continually telling players to hurry, that is not supported by any gameplay mechanics. Mostly, these reminders drew my attention to the lag between typing a command and receiving a response.
There’s no real “search” command with Perplexity — an object’s notable features are revealed when you look at it. The default state of objects involves less description, which led to an infuriating encounter with “a bush, a bush, and a tree.” (You couldn’t look directly at either bush, because the parser didn’t understand which bush you wanted to check, but “look at bushes” eventually revealed that each bush had its own identifying adjective.)
Overall, Headlights felt more focused than Kidney Kwest, the last Perplexity game I encountered. Most of the experience involved looking at objects and applying them logically to move to the next location. I particularly enjoyed the puzzle that involved a surge of adrenaline, because it did an unusually good job of using a narrative to justify the following sequence of events.
Headlights worked smoothly when the parser and I stuck to clear language and simple concepts, which raises interesting questions about the future of Perplexity as a game design tool. Creations like Lost Pig, Vain Empires, and Zozzled are entertaining because they play with unconventional language and abstract concepts, and it may be difficult for Perplexity to enjoy similar success.
Thanks for the writeup! I'm the developer of the Perplexity engine, I thought I'd respond to a couple of your points above.
ReplyDeletePerplexity does have an ability to search, it just had an unfortunate bug early in the competition. so something like this does work:
[spoiler]
?:get the grass
This grass is too thick to pick up. It does look thin enough to cut off with something though.
?:where is something sharp
inside a rocky corner, inside a world, north, on top of a boulder, and west somewhere
?:find something that is sharp
(going to the clearing...)
(going to the rocky corner...)
** THE ROCKY CORNER **
Walking into the rocky corner, you see less and less vegetation until there is only dirt and stones around you.
You see a boulder with something shiny on it.
You see a pebble.
To the east is a clearing.
[/spoiler]
or "look under the rug", etc.
It is tricky to identify things when there are multiple things that aren't described well like "there are bushes". Looking at "the bush" gets an error back because there isn't "the bush" as you described. Alternatives that work are "look at the bushes" "look at all the bushes" "look at every bush" or "look at a bush" (which picks a random one). I think the problem in the game is that it describes the place as having "a bush and a bush" which really should have say "2 bushes".
I'll take a look at the examples you gave and see how the engine would fare building something with more abstraction. Thanks for the pointer!