Why yes I am responding to my own post almost immediately.
I had my first really good clear-headed week of programming in a while, and if there’s one thing I learned, worrying about if you 100% deserve your good luck/fortune or stretch where you’re focusing well & dealing with problems efficiently is a really really bad way to take advantage of it. And you don’t get brownie points for it!
So I managed to get a pretty good release 2 (at any rate it plugs a lot of holes and closes the issues I wrote on github) for Beef, Beans, Grief, Greens on itch.io.
The features:
- 2 new core points near the end of the journey. Sadly, I neglected one sort of food!
- a warp item that sends you beneath Reeve Row, neglecting all bonus points
- a warp item that sends you to the final room, again neglecting all bonus points
- a few more bonus points scattered around. They are all meal-related. Two of them only appear if you otherwise pitched a perfect game before going down.
- a sort of storage bin, the Far-Forage Star Storage, so your inventory isn’t cluttered.
All these may have bugs, with the fast turnaround, but I did a lot of planning during ParserComp because you couldn’t add any new stuff, and I had a good couple of days.
The closed issues in my repo lead to spoilers of the features added, if you just want to see it. (Click on “closed.” Everything #9 and beyond is new.)
The warp items are meant to be amusing and, if you stumbled on the situation where you seemed like you were blocked out (you technically weren’t, but that “technically” is a VERY serious modifier. You had to have a LOT of faith not to feel that way) you can now figure the magic words for either consumable.
So anyone who got stuck and wonders about the end, no reason to bull all the way through.
Thanks to all who provided transcripts and bug reports! Often your observations tipped off even more, or helped me make a core fix that will help re-releases of other entries in the series.
point scoring spoilers also hidden below the cut
The two core points you get occur after Hedgy Hill.
After you give the command to leave, there is a Faerie Fair. You call upon two entities, BERRY BEAR and CHERRY CHAIR (as in chairperson). (You see, the meal list was woefully lacking in fruits in release 1.) There’s a bonus point there too.
You get two more bonus points if you did everything you could and try to go down. The game calls you back. This is to balance things out – Dove n Doubt and Gap, Goo had no bonus points, but the other two side rooms did. The things to change are FAILED FACES and VAIN VARNISH.
The Far-Forage Star Storage, where you put items you only need for the feast, has a bonus point, too. The adjective may seem a bit odd, but I think the pun works with the descriptions. I hope it does!
The fifth bonus point is dropped by the BOPPER BEE. Again, the adjective is not a super common word, but it’s a consumable the feast doesn’t have yet.
There’ll need to be a release 3 even with bugs aside.
You see, I didn’t write in all the clever responses, but at least, for instance,
table of stuck state guesses
mist-1 (text) mist-2 (text) mist-rule got-yet leet-rule mist-txt
"truck" "trait" -- false -- "<CLEVER REJECT TEXT>."
which was in the initial ParserComp release, was changed to
"truck" "trait" -- false -- "[good-guess]."
to say good-guess:
say "Good guess, but I didn't make time to think of witty text. This will change post-release"
In several places. I’m not sure why I didn’t do things this way in the first place! I think I just wanted something that stood out and I figured “ahh, the player’ll never see it anyway!”
I was able to skate earlier in the series. Not this time.
(Also, if you do find any new rhymes, send in issues if you want! I can’t promise I’ll include them, but if I do, I’ll be glad to give credit. And getting issues is a strong motivator in any case.)