python game

Hi

We have a ParserComp 2022 participation certificate that we'd like to send to you, for being part of the competition. 

If you'd like to claim it, could you please email the organisers at parsercomp@gmail.com?

Thanks!

I posted a review of the game on IFDB. https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=lh35qwlfvxl2h7yd&review=67158

I'm going to re-post the review here. The review argues that the game is unfinished, and unplayably buggy.

In this game, you can fight a wolf or a bear. During the tutorial, you fight the wolf, and then the bear. You can't defeat the bear in the tutorial, so you must run (or lose the fight).

At that point, the game lets you "nap" in one of two locations, the field or the forest. If you nap in the field, you have a random chance of meeting a trader. If you nap in the forest, well, the game is then supposed to give you a random chance of meeting a trader or fighting a wolf or bear, but, in fact, you'll only meet a trader.

This game is distributed as Python source code, allowing me to read the code to debug it.

The problem lies in the "random_events" function in Handler.py. It computes a max value "a" (for example, a=9), then computes a random value "b" from 0 to "a", as if rolling a die with 9 sides. The game then never uses the random variable "b", but instead uses the variable "a", as if the player had always rolled the maximum value on the die. As a result, the player only ever meets the trader, regardless of whether you nap in the field or forest.

This was all preventable if the author had followed common-sense guidelines, such as the IFComp guidelines for authors. https://ifcomp.org/about/guidelines

The guidelines there say to playtest your game and to credit your beta testers. But the "credits" command (which only works when you're not in combat or trading) credits only the author, and no beta testers. I think that if anyone had beta tested this game, they would have discovered this bug, and the author would have fixed it before now.

Furthermore, the guidelines recommend against submitting games written in Inform or TADS, and not to implement your own parser implementation in Python. Distributing the game as Python made it unnecessarily difficult to play.

Finally, upon reviewing the code, I see that there's no way to "win" the game. Even if the randomizer bug is fixed, at best, you might fight the bear, drink a few health potions, and win the fight, but you just get a few more units of meat, bone, and fang from winning. The more experience points you earn, the higher your "level" is, but leveling up doesn't do anything.

There should be a way to win the game. Perhaps the game might end saying "you win!" when you defeat the bear. Ideally, there would even be some kind of story, giving me a reason to fight wolves and bears.