Announcing Calm Post-Comp Release

Playing Project Announcements
1

Calm is a game of postapocalyptic relaxation set in a future in which stress is deadly and wilderness has reclaimed the cities.

Since the beginning of the ifcomp when reviews started rolling in, Melvin and I have been taking a look at the game and thought about the ways in which it could be improved. Over the last month and a half we’ve been working away, and today we have released Version 2.

This is a release we’re both proud of; we believe it is a significant improvement on the more alpha-like version that was first entered into the competition. Changes include richer descriptions, a more forgiving parser and a comprehensive inbuilt hint system. Efforts have been taken to minimise fiddliness: you can now also just make hot chocolate if you don’t fancy going through all the individual steps. There may be further releases in the future, but this is likely to be it for this year at least.

I’ve posted it the ifarchive, so soon the latest release will be playable off IFDB, but until that’s uploaded, it can played on or downloaded from bubbleof.me

2

Hooray! This was one of the post-comp releases I was most looking forward to.

3

Neat! Looking forward to checking it out, and, you know, actually finishing the game!

4

Congrats on doing this so quickly–I know you wanted to write in a lot of changes. I’m hoping to see them, too, and poke around a lot more.

/downloads version 2 from IFDB, since it’s there now.

5

Joey, you can also go to the game’s page on IFDB and click ‘Add a news item’ to announce this there.

6

For those curious, I just verified that Calm is now (as expected)

  1. most definitely solvable,
  2. more loaded with cool clues to tell you the right things to do

especially on easy mode, where I like how it clues what you can interact with,

  1. more organized and streamlined with regard to the puzzles and world map
  2. more robust as I compared my comp-version transcripts to the version-2 transcripts
    and
  3. more than interesting enough to try as a different type of character now that I’ve won it one way. So, well done!
7

Ooh thanks, I’ll do just that!

The bribe’s in the post :wink: In all seriousness, as far as I can tell only two people managed to complete the game in the old version. The game is much more accessible now.

8

At least three. Unless you somehow knew that I did, which would be very creepy.

9

You know that black car that’s been tailing you recently? No? Good…