What is Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider? This was my entry into the Iron ChIF Pilot Episode: Non-Human Language Device Battle. You can see the battle take place over this long forum thread… or you can just check out the IFDB page.
Now that voting is over, here’s a couple of extra things right away.
Cover Art
(For the relative quality of the end result, this took me way too long, which is perhaps a neat inversion of how the competition itself went for me…)
Release 2
Here is the first post-competition version (Itch page with a .zblorb download).
Forum upload: Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider.zblorb (390.7 KB)
This is based on my own further testing after the deadline, the gameplay transcript that @Rovarsson kindly sent to me, and some observations of what difficulties people encountered in the audience and help threads.
The actual changelog is:
Release 2 Changelog - INCLUDES SPOILERS
Gameplay
- Stranger’s items now show up under INVENTORY.
- “a smashed shiny man” in room description renamed to “the smashed pieces of a shiny man”.
- Smoke now very occassionally rises from the exploded oojamaflip.
- The lights on the brass box now very occassionally blink once the oojamaflip has been replaced, and until it has successfully been used.
- PRAY now points to the dealie when it’s required, instead of the brass box.
- PRAY should now be more helpful at the end. The fairy hopefully also nudges the player a bit more in the right direction.
Writing
- A few phrasings tweaked.
Bugs
- Game wouldn’t consider dank hole a likely target if you learned about it from powering up the machine but hadn’t examined the machine specifically.
- Machine, wheel and floppy doodah descriptions should now accurately reflect each stage of getting the machine working.
- Fairy no longer magically knows that the oojamaflip makes the gadget say “khong” if you didn’t examine it before it exploded.
- Can now refer to the stranger as “spider”.
Release 3
The Itch version has been updated with the first bug report for the post-comp version (h/t @alwinfy). Not sure how many files I can upload to this post, but here it is in that format too: Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider.zblorb (390.7 KB)
Release 3 Changelog - INCLUDES SPOILERS
Bugs
- The exploded oojamaflip was still being listed on the flat wall after being thrown in the bottomless pit.
Release 4…?
Is that it? Is it perfect now? Of course not! But are there any simple things I can do to improve it before I return to my work-in-progress?
Most importantly, have I broken anything in Release 2 3? If you spot any bugs in that version, please let me know by PM, email or carrier pigeon. (Fairy messengers are NOT accepted after what happened last time.)
I am also considering either an additional REMEMBER command (not too dissimilar from the VOCAB command in @Draconis’ entry), or just having the fairy mention what an item has been used for if you re-examine it… but I’m also tempted to leave things more or less as they are.