Coming Home - Interactive Fiction by Andrew Katz 1997.

This file contains three sections:

A. A series of Hints to examine at your own risk of spoiling the game.
B. A computer generated walkthrough of one possible solution.
C. Some notes on implementation issues with Inform 6.

A. Hints.

What is this game about?

Well it is about coming home to the house you grew up in, many years
later. It is really just a simple puzzle game. You solve puzzles and
you explore and collect things. Eventually you find the thing that
tells you you have won. In hints I will outline each puzzle and its
solution in the rough order you will be facing them.
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1. How to enter the house.
   If you have tried to enter the house you have realized it is locked,
   and you do not have the key.

   Common sense: Find the key or find someone to ask for the key.

   Hint: Did you ask Ken? Did you see Ken?

2. How to pick up Allison at the train station.
   Ken has told you that you need to do that. It is the only thing he
   says at this point in the game so it must be important. Maybe Allison
   has the key to the house?

   Common sense: Drive a car. Where is a car? In the garage (sometimes).

3. Open the garage door.
   Have you tried that and found out it is stuck?

   Common sense: Find a tool which you can use to open the garage door.
   Something long and heavy and used to pry open things.

   Hint: Did you see the crowbar?

   About the crowbar: If Ken is there he will not let you take it. Ken
   will never let you take anything. You must wait until he leaves.
   Also, the crowbar can only be carried alone. If you have something
   you must drop it first. To take something else, you must drop the
   crowbar. Drop it where you can get to it again.

4. The house.
   Remember to open that door right away. Doors in this home have a way
   of locking themselves. They also close themselves as well. Luckily
   there are no doors between the 4 main living areas. And, remember to
   take those house keys or you may get locked outside!

5. Eating.
   You are probably getting quite hungry by now. This must be attended to.
   Where to get food?

   Common sense: The kitchen. Where in the kitchen? The refrigerator.

   Problem: You cannot open the refrigerator by yourself. Why not? Well
   this is a game and anyway you have not been home for a while and you
   feel guilty just taking for yourself like everyone else does around
   here.

   Common sense: Ask someone. Actually, order someone.
   someone, open the frig   Who? There is one person who spends more
   time in the kitchen than anyone else. Ofcourse, Mom!

   Hint: Remember to eat some now and take some for later. Food has a
   way of disappearing in this house. And, do not drink anything. It
   does not make you any less hungry, but makes you want to pee.
   And, do not get greedy. And, do not hide food someplace and come back
   for more (the game will not let you).

   Other Note: There is a person in this house who may cause you much
   grief and you may not realize it. This person spends time wandering
   between the play room and the kitchen, taking food, and then
   going to the bathroom (see below). Do not take the remote control or
   your supply of food may run out even quicker! (Because this person
   will get bored quicker without being able to change channels.)

6. Going to the bathroom.
   Sometime afer eating, you are told you have to go to the bathroom.
   This must be attended to or dire consequences will result. Fortunately,
   this house has two bathrooms. The problem is, by the time you get there,
   it is probably too dirty to use.

   Common sense: Clean the bathroom. But how? There is no way.

   Hint: Ask someone one. Tell someone. No, order someone to. Who?
   Who do you think cleans this house? It is Mom again. And, remember to
   make a beeline for the bathroom before it gets dirty again. I think
   the upstairs bathroom is better (it is further from the play room
   where a certain person spends alot of waking time).

   Note: The characters move around alot in this game. This may seem
   like random, but it is really pattern movement and a roughly daily
   cycle of sleep and waking (days pass quick, though). And, people only
   populate a small collection of rooms. For example, Mom is only in the
   kitchen or master bedroom when not cleaning.

7. Getting into difficult places.
   Have you ever reached Ken's room and been unable to open his door. So,
   you knock. And it does no good. Maybe he has his headphones on?

   Implausability: How can Ken stop you from opening his door (inside
   doors never lock)? And, when Ken leaves, you don't see him, and he
   does not see you and closes his door behind him? Well, all I can
   say is that Ken has his own rules of existance.

   Have you tried to open the basement door?

   Clue: The game tells you what to do. But you do not know who.

   Common sense: Ask every person you see. One person may be offering help.

8. Opening the basement door.
   This is deliberately the most difficult puzzle because important things
   are in the basement. At this point you have ordered Ken to open it since
   he offered to help, and now he needs a present.

   Common Sense: Give him what you have. Think like Ken. He probably does
   not think of food as a present (since he can get it himself), and you
   really need your food.

   Puzzle2: So you finally gave him something and he took it, but he is
   still asking for a present.

   Common sense: Give him something else.
   
   Hint: Fortunately a second thing will do the trick, even though the
   game probably made you think that the whole idea of giving Ken a
   present may not work.

9. Game winning.
   It is easy at this point. Remember to unlock, then open, then if you
   see something...

   Common sense: Notes are for reading.

P.S. Remember - you will probably die many times in solving this game.
The idea is to use what you found out from a life the next time you play.
For example, you may die because you did not think of eating and taking more
food for exploring. And when you got hungry the second time you either did
not get back to the kitchen in time, Mom was not there in time, or there was
no food left.

B. This walk though was generated by the script facility in inform -
   actually part of the Z-machine, whatever that is. Anyway, the random
   seed was set to value 4. There are many random events in this game and
   sometimes it may be impossible to win because of them.

   TBD.

C. Implementation Notes.

This game was my learning game for both ALAN and Inform. The plot and
puzzles were all thought up in an hour. It took 2 days to code in ALAN
and maybe 10 days (not full time) to code in Inform. The biggest headache
with ALAN was the coding of 2 doors for every door. In Inform, objects can
be in 2 places, so I imvented the Connector class and used doors.h from
L. Ross Raszewski.

Here is a list of technical obsticals which I solved in Inform 6 for this
game:

TBD.

Note that this game uses a limited subset of the verbs available in the
Inform library. ALAN does not come with a library, so when I rewrote the
game, I relied on the fact that default responses in the Inform library
would make sense. This is true alot of the time, but not always true.

For example (and I am leaving in this bug for purposes of illustration) :
put garbage in can - thinks that garbage refers to the garbage can.
The reason for this bug is that 'put' is not part of this game. You can
put anything you want into the garbage can, and since the object is just
there for show (no one takes out the garbage), it just serves as an
extra container (which you do not need for this game).

Most people have beta testers to try out commands, but since I have no
friends, I am sure I have more of my share of inconsistent or silly
responses in this game. Hopefully, the contest judges will report some
problems to me. Maybe once this game is out on the internet I will be
contacted by future players.

A note to Allison - please correct my spelling and email me. Thanks.


