The Master of the Land
An interactive fiction intrigue in an immersive and dynamic world
Interactive Fiction Competition 2018 - 6th position
XYZZY Awards 2018 - Nominee - Best Implementation
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A world that changes with every action
Freedom to explore
Radically different playthroughs
Lots of dancing
People wearing skulls
It creates a seemingly dynamic world, gives the player complete agency within that world and then says ‘go’.
❧ Ade McT
Odd and audacious.
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A rich story with multiple plots
A historical fantasy set in the early 19th century Mediterranean, The Master of the Land deals with power and paranoia in an age of counter-revolutionary reaction: the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. During a carnival, dancers dance, politicians conspire and a crying ghost haunts the whole place. The protagonist, Irene, is fascinated and appalled at the same time by everything happening around her.
A narrative experiment with a dynamic setting
Text is mixed and combined to show a changing place, with many characters moving around, weather, different events -balls, dinners, ceremonies- and interlocking storylines. With more than 80 thousand words and more than ten major plots, each playthrough shows only a fraction of the possibilities.
The game is not intended to be won
And it cannot be lost.
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80,000 words. Each playthrough takes 1.5 to 2 hours. Several totally different playthroughs possible.
Did you enjoy it? It'd be wonderful to know! Please rate the game so I know that making it was worth it!
Ps. Opus 2. October 2018.
Some year not too far, in a foggy morning just before sunrise, a normal girl takes a normal walk in a normal forest...
Download
Install instructions
Unzip the file and open index.html with a current browser.
Development log
- New version: easier navigationMay 08, 2019
- The Master of the Land ~ A confessionDec 03, 2018
- What reviewers saidNov 27, 2018
Comments
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Hi - I get that this game is 'not intended to be won'. Yes. Good. However, I'm obsessed with it, and I'm wondering if there's at all a possibility to *spoiler*
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...save a particular person from a very bad fate? (You know who I'm talking about. Poppa V.) I've played it mannnny a time. I'm just curious, is this at all an option? Or is that too 'winning'eque? Thank you for you game (and time.)
Hi devs! Do you think you can add a save and load feature to the game? Sometimes i would accidentally click on the option that I didn’t want to choose and there is no going back. I am sorry if that is too much to ask and it is totally alright if you want to leave the game as it is, I love this game very much and thank you for making it.
Very intrigued by this concept, but I keep getting the following error at turn 7 that makes it impossible to play:
⚠ SyntaxError: Unexpected token '<' (https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/1556668/index.html?v=1574335272:: 14100)
hope this can be fixed!
I haven't been able to reproduce it. What browser and OS are you using? Can you test on a different one?
Any chance you could release a twee file or a more in-depth explanation of how your game works? When you say 'containers,' do you mean arrays? As someone just dipping their toes into writing choice-based fiction and who knows very little about programming (haven't had to learn about arrays yet), I'm very curious!
Thanks for your interest! "Container" here isn't related to any programming concept, it's just how I decided to name some parts of the algorithm... in the code, they must be simply some JS objects.
I'm in fact a bit ashamed of how primitive the code in The Master of the Land. I think you can import it into Twine and see the actual Snowman code, but I'm afraid it's really unreadable. I didn't write the game with Snowman, but with a custom pseudocode that I converted to JS using the AWK utility. All extremely complicated.
I see! Yeah, I tried importing it into Twine (prior to your suggesting the same thing) and it took a looong time but was ultimately "successful"--by that I mean it finished importing. But it doesn't actually show anything when I click on the file in Twine. It's...completely blank. Oh well. I understand, based on what you're saying, that it will look very strange anyways if I ever saw it.
Just fyi, scroll bars don't appear on the page when playing online, so it's impossible to see some of the choices without zooming out. I think 'Enable scrollbars" has to be checked on the "Edit game" page.
Fixed! Thank you very much