A couple times a month I ride the NJ Transit train from New York (where
I study) to Philadelphia (my parent's home). I will stay for a weekend
(Friday afternoon to Sunday morning) and then head back to school for
the coming week. Door to door the trip takes around 4 hours. Round-trip
is 8 hours. The time I spend at home is normally 36 hours. If you do the
math, you see that I love my parents dearly (I don't know too many other
people I would make this sacrifice for.)
I am currently in the middle of a longer piece of interactive fiction. I
was browsing through the newsgroups when I saw an announcement for the
Art Comp. The rules stated that the comp was a great opportunity for
writers whose games were taking a long time to write (like mine) and for
newbie writers (like me). I saw the opportunity and decided to run with
it. My first idea was very ambitious, and I found myself with a project
that would take longer than the two weeks I had budgeted for it. I was
feeling pretty helpless, riding the train back to NY, when I was hit by
inspiration. Why not write a game that simulated a train ride? My
immediate inspirations for the game were built by just looking around
the compartment and remembering my own personal experiences. I decided
on a later ride (when I was on the train at 12:30 at night) to set the
game as the Last Ride of the Night. You now have the results of that
experiment.
My immediate problem was the lack of a plot. I understood that the
competition didn't require (or necessarily want) an elaborate plot, but
I still needed something to drive the game forward. I could have done
more, but the train is filled with different objects and things you can
do with them. And with the game only having 60 turns (the length of time
before the train reaches its destination) one can play multiple times
and find something new. Plus, with 6 different endings, exploring the
game is the only way to figure out everything that is in there.
I would like to thank my betatesters; Daphne, Allison, Cirk Bejnar, and
Hypernaut. They helped me build a game that would be very sparse (and
poorly implemented) without them. I owe any success of this game to
them. I would also like to thank my close friend Benji Walters, whom I
was able to always bounce ideas off of. His conversations with me
enriched the game.
Thank you for playing my game, and hopefully with the experience I
garnered writing this one, my other (future) games will only be
enhanced.
