Narrow Your Eyes

NOTE: This web-based version has limited support for multi-media, which was a key feature of this game. The sound definitely does not work at all, and I am not sure about the graphics. I would recommend downloading the game file from the project archive and playing it offline using an interpreter like Gargoyle. I put this game on this site mainly because I'm a completist.

This was written as part of a group project to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of They Might Be Giant's album, Apollo 18. I wrote this in collaboration with Ben Collins-Sussman.

Our goal for this project was to explore the potential of supplementing text with some multimedia features, mostly sound and some animation. At the time, this was not easy to do since both the authoring tools and the interpreters that players used to view the games had all developed from text-only standards. If we were to do this sort of project again with modern tools that take advantage of web-centric technologies, the whole thing would have been a lot easier. 

That the whole thing worked at all is something of a miracle, but I am not sold at all on making multimedia so prominent in interactive fiction. My take home lesson from this story was that effects should be subtle and that most of the author's time would better be spent on improving writing than worrying about bells and whistles.

walkthrough

IFwiki Entry

IFDb Entry

Source Code