I am very very very very glad that you’ve been enjoying Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing and that you took the time to post such a nice review. Thank you.
1. As an author, can you keep adding to the game? So, could you add extra episodes / areas etc and then just recompile the game?
Yes. This is complicated.
Save files of the type generated by the built-in state-saving function of Inform 7 games are not compatible between versions, because the game’s underlying data structure isn’t necessarily the same between versions, because it all gets assembled from the ground up at compilation.
Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing doesn’t use that save game format. (The usual SAVE/RESTORE verbs are forbidden, because allowing players to use both save formats at once would be a huge mess.) Instead, the auto-save functionality uses a much less robust but much more “reliable” format, which is, I essentially laid out my own personal data structure that doesn’t change when I recompile.
This is accomplished with a bunch of external files containing tables. There’s a table for which items you possess; there’s a table for how things are arranged in your cabin; there’s a sort of “miscellaneous” table that keeps track of what color your jacket is etc. I think there are at least five different tables.
This means that the autosave function only saves what I bother to make it save, unlike the native save function that saves the entire game state. RVAFF doesn’t save something as basic as your current location, but that’s because I wanted you to always start out in your cabin.
This technique will be revolutionary, as soon as everyone else starts using it. I wrote a bunch of blog posts that explain it in more detail. Here is the first one.
ANYWAY, all this makes it “very simple” to add content to this game, while preserving every players’ progress, in a way that’s normally impossible. If you’ve found the baseball cap, that was added a few days after the game was released, because I think @DougOrleans noticed there wasn’t any headwear available for when it was raining. I’ve also been able to fix some bugs and make some quality of life changes.
It would be fun to add some more substantial content, but when I made an attempt at this I found myself overwhelmed. It’s not a technical issue, it’s just that the game is SO HUGE. I did do some design work for an additional area, though. Maybe someday I’ll get the brainpower together to implement it. What a fun treat that would be!
2. Roughly how many badges are there?
I will decline to answer this. There was a lot of discussion on this forum about collecting badges a few years ago, though. I would recommend that, after you’ve run out of stuff to explore and ideas to try on your own, you seek out one of those old threads. But maybe don’t read it all at once.
3. How do the time sensitive features work? Is there an amount of time IRL that a player has to keep coming back before certain events trigger?
The basic time mechanic simply confirms that today’s date is not the same as the previously saved date. I don’t think anything in the game actually notices how many days it’s been since you last visited.
A couple things will only progress if you return over multiple days, such as if you’re waiting for something wet to dry out. Even when it would make sense for such a thing to progress in your absence, you have to actually show up in order for time to pass.
Certain things that seem may seem random, like the weather and the appearance of wildlife, are determined by the real-world date. So if you manage to see a bald eagle at the gazebo on May 3rd, you can tell your friends, and they can check it out for themselves.
Then there are a couple things that depend on the day of the week.
Please don’t feel compelled to find everything, though. Fly fishing isn’t supposed to be a chore.