As a kid, my favorite of the 24 soft serve flavors was creme de menthe because it is exactly this!
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I seem to remember there’s a place called ‘Get Your Licks’ which does it? (Can’t remember where; some city in Iowa, I think.) Apparently it’s pretty intense.
(Hey, aren’t we meant to be asking Ryan questions in here? Ryan, did you ever escape… Mystery of Cave Maze…)
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Inquiring minds… 
Yes.
Here is the annotated source code for The Statue Got Me High.
Here is the annotated source code for Winter Storm Draco.
Here is some dinosaur-generation code with commentary from The Island of Doctor Wooby.
Here’s a post explaining the basic methods of autosaving used in Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing. Here is a second post on the subject. Here is a third one. Since we’ve been talking about Vorple, maybe I should specify that these techniques were developed with the Quixe interpreter in mind. Quixe is able to handle Inform 7’s “external file” functions in the browser’s LocalStorage with no problem. Vorple can’t handle external files at all (last time I checked, which was probably in 2021), so these specific techniques aren’t applicable in that environment. Unless they are now.
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It looks like I never did escape… Mystery of Cave Maze, assuming the “Rex Bader” in there is meant to be me. As far as I know, only a couple of people have solved the Mystery of Cave Maze. I suppose at first glance it doesn’t look like there’s any mystery there to be solved.
If you’re interested in other mysteries that few if any people have solved, look under “other missions” at club wooby.
Oh, and here are some Mysteries of A Rope of Chalk. The forum is telling me I already linked to it in this thread. WHATEVER
Also, here are some discussion questions for Even Some More Tales from Castle Balderstone along similar lines.
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Yes, strawberry (red, albeit too pink today) vanilla (white) and pistacchio (green) form the Italian Tricolore. Perhaps an intermediate, more italo-american than american, step toward the US neapolitan gelato ?
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio
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Bryer’s Vienetta! (back in the day)
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I have a question!
At last week’s SF Bay Area IF Meetup, we played The Little Match Girl against the Universal Sisterhood of Naughty Little Girls.
I tried playing it back in November when it first came out, but I found myself totally unable to progress in several places, because I was unable to find important exits to various rooms.
For example, this room has three exits.
Lime Street
It was a gloomy London night, rainy and cold, and the flame of the streetlamp that burned outside the Scrooge home took on a singularly lonesome aspect.A dark alley opened up across the street to the southeast.
In many games, but not most of your games, players can type EXITS to see a list of exits, which is especially helpful when the exits might not be obvious, like in the alley to the southeast.
Alley
A faint orange glow lit the alleyway, casting long shadows over heaps of refuse and rivulets of greasy rainwater.
(EXITS does work in Robin & Orchid, FWIW.)
My question is: would you consider adding EXITS support to future games?
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(I feel like this is a TADS vs Inform thing – i.e., that TADS games tend to get EXITS by default – but I haven’t checked this is actually true. I’d love it if more Inform games had EXITS.)
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I am considering it. You bring up an interesting point by citing a case in which one way of answering EXITS would spoil a puzzle solution, but the other would be unhelpfully misleading. I am realizing that not every quality of life feature has the same utility in every situation.
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Minor point, under a3Lite, EXITS don’t list exits toward a text (that is, soft boundaries), as in adv3’s FakeConnector and this makes sense in the context of soft boundaries.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
I have a very spoilerific question about “The Little Match Girl at the Battle of Gray Peaks.”
I posted a two-star review of this game on IFDB.
This game is boring on purpose
You do, in fact, have to solve the logic puzzle to win this game, and it is very boring work. In fact, when you win, the game explicitly acknowledges how boring it is, as part of a bonus puzzle.
Specifically, at the end of the game, the game presents the player with a “tiny riddle.”
One tiny riddle remains; it is of no interest to most, but perhaps it will entertain you. The riddle is this: What truth of warfare did Scrooge the Mammalgirl reveal at the Battle of the Gray Peaks?
It is a single word, of seven letters.
There are a bunch of hints, and the answer is…
> scrooge
No, that’s not it. It is all my fault—I am being too coy.Recall that, in order to teach teach this lesson, Scrooge had to assign each of Helkithin’s units to a very specific opponent.
I should let you try another guess before I explain it too directly.
> hint
I’m sorry, that’s not it either. Let me show you the critical information. To arrange this particular outcome for the battle,Narth was matched against Kheti;
Presh was matched against Eleta;
Edeks was matched against Udoch;
Helkithin was matched against Whicestik;
Scrooge was matched against Ninoksh;
Rithus was matched against Akheut;
and Xhess was matched against Ethys.Try another guess.
> warring
The key to this is an old puzzle-technique, which will serve you well if you are ever called upon to match the wits of nerds or dorks. It is a sort of puzzle in which one compares two words of the same length and notices that in one particular position—the second letter of each word, for example—the two words share the same letter—the D shared by EDEKS and UDOCH, for example.Try another guess.
> tedious
That’s exactly right!Although perhaps it is unwise of me to invite the comparison.
It was, indeed, quite tedious to manually match up all of the units against all of the other units using the combat simulator. Building out that 8x8 table is a lot of straightforward hard work. When I was nearly halfway through, I remember thinking, “gosh, I hope there’s a really cool payoff for this!”
When I read that the riddle solution was “tedious,” and that “tedious” is/was the “truth of warfare,” I thought you were saying that the point of the game is that warfare is tedious, and that you’d intentionally built a game with a tedious central puzzle to make that point. I thought it was a practical joke, at the player’s expense.
(Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!)
I quite nearly titled my review “This game is tedious on purpose,” but I was afraid it would be too big of a spoiler.
On IFDB, you replied,
I don’t think the title of this review is accurate. I didn’t intend for this game to be boring. I wanted it to be fun, and my testers said they had fun; if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have released the game in the state I did.
Based on your impressions in this thread, I think you may have had an anomalous experience with the game. I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy it more.
So, my question is, what were you saying? I thought you were saying that the central puzzle of the game was tedious. If I got that wrong, then, what did you mean when you wrote that the “truth of warfare” is “tedious”?
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I’ve updated the wiki page at https://www.ifwiki.org/Ask_Ryan!
It’s my first time updating that wiki page. I hope my paraphrasing of the questions is acceptable and doesn’t put words in anyone’s digital mouths.
Edit: The wiki is now down. It remains to be seen whether there is an illusory correlation with my edit.
Edit: The wiki is back up. Phew!!
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