Dr. Froth says:

There has been quite a bit of progress on "Gathered in Darkness."

In fact the game got so big that Alex had to make me a couple of special patches to allow Quest and QDK to even run it. It seems that I surpassed anything attempted before on size (and considering that this is a single player adventure...that is pretty darn big). Everyone will have to download a new version of quest just to play it.

The game is set up in chapters (nine of them) and so I have set it up to enter it in the IF comp and have it judged on the first 3 chapters (like a prequel or something). That should keep things under the two hour time limit.

I have finished coding the entire story, and the objects for every room (all 200+). The only thing I am doing now is working on the player journal (which updates as you go along) and the in-game hint system. After that I am done.

I am confident that I will make the uploading deadline for the comp. (As long as I quit crashing the program due to size... The notepad file alone is sitting at close to 2500kb right now.)

My notepad.asl file is 468 kb right now. I have a-little more than 100 rooms. That's about a half to a third of the rooms that are going to be in my game. Including a small tutorial game that first-time text-adventurers can play to practice commands and such before playing the main game, there are 5 major levels planned. Within those major levels are sub-levels, bringing the total to 8 levels. Each level is a new type of place/situation so the game is like 5 games in one, but has a consistent theme. There will be a soundtrack with a channel selector to choose diffrent types of background music. There are graphics. I'm even considering narrating every single line (I'll have to test that though... this feature will probably be one of the last additions). I'm glad you told me about the Quest-crash thing, since I'll know what's going on now if that occurs to me. I'm stuck in the tutorial part of the game on some odd errors occurring. I'm waiting for Alex to help me on that. Although about 80% of the rooms I have set right now are basically finished. Mine is not a multi-player game.

200 rooms for an IF comp entry? If the player has to visit a significant portion of those in the course of playing, it's a bad idea to enter it in the IF comp.

Don't worry...IF comp players only go through the first three chapters (less than 30 locations I think).

Speaking of that...check out my Beta Test post please.

IFComp players generally bash games that are larger than a certain size (i.e. anything that can't be completed in 2 hours or less). Yes, I've discovered that the hard way myself.

I'm gonna grab a few high-ranking entries and get a feeling for what shows as a good game...

Mine's going to be based more from functionality and interactivity, as well as a rather simplistic outline.
- although my rate of development is rather slow...

I'm guessing for a game to bash through the new and improved Quest-4 boundaries, then there's gotta be a hell of a lot of code..