"Dinner Bell" errata/bugs

Playing Game Hints
1

I’m posting these bugs here because I’m too lazy to find out where to actually send them. These are errata (bugs, inappropriate responses, etc.) from Jenni Polodna’s “Dinner Bell”, at least in the version here: pr-if.org/play/apollo18/09/ My apologies if this version is out of date already.

[spoiler]> EXAMINE FLOOR // I still have no idea where the “ichthyosaur” is supposed to be located in the room. Anyone?
The ichthyosaur is beautiful as well as scientific. You could have been both an artist and a marine archaeologist, although you never could have made it as a puppeteer.

STAND ON FLOOR
That’s not something you can stand on.

SIT // I’m not sure if this action always defaults to (on Dr Beagle) or not.
(on Dr Beagle)
You can’t reach Dr Beagle behind that thick glass.

PAT ME
You pat yourself on the closest thing you can find to its head. You don’t know what you were trying to accomplish there, but whatever.

PAT MY HEAD
You pat your head on the closest thing you can find to its head. You don’t know what you were trying to accomplish there, but whatever.

WEAR COLLAR
You’d have to take it off first.

BLOW ME
// No response. In fact “BLOW X” for any X other than the candles gives no response.

TASTE RAVINGS
This tastes about like you remember, although you’re not sure when you last tasted Ravings.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]> EXAMINE PHOTO // post–taking the bacon from it
A smiling blond woman holding an empty tray. It’s kind of a weird photo, now that the bacon’s gone.

EXAMINE TRAY
Oh boy oh boy oh boy, it’s bacon![/spoiler]

[spoiler]If the egg is the first edible item you GET, its “classical conditioning” message is a bit inappropriate, or at least not as funny as it’s intended to be.

If you attempt to GET BACON based on smelling the room, you’ll be repeatedly prevented from getting the bacon (with an inappropriate message) until after you have examined the photo.[/spoiler]

And here’s a funny exchange that I eventually figured out was due to the cup’s being not-a-container. This is a problem with the Inform parser, more than anything else:

[spoiler]>put cup in bucket
(the cup in Griswold’s Legendary Bucket of Wax Pears)
You put the cup into Griswold’s Legendary Bucket of Wax Pears.

put glove in cup
Which do you mean, the cup button or the cup?

cup
Which do you mean, the cup button or the cup?

the cup
Which do you mean, the cup button or the cup?

put glove in the cup
Which do you mean, the cup button or the cup?

not button
What glove in the not button cup? What are you even talking about?

get cup
(the cup)
Taken.

put glove in cup
(the cup)
That can’t contain things.

// Ohhh.[/spoiler]

Lest anyone get the wrong idea: Even with this handful of errata, “Dinner Bell” is super polished and fun to play. I highly recommend it! :slight_smile:

2

Actually, that’s the famous disambiguation loop that crops up when all the words one item’s name are in another item’s name. You can use an extension to fix that.

Hope this helps.

3

Yeah, but I think (haven’t bothered to check) that if the “cup” is a container and the “cup button” isn’t, then “PUT X IN CUP” will automagically do the right thing. That particular command is (I think) ambiguous only if both items are equally unreasonable targets of the “PUT … IN” action. (But I await correction.)

4

Oh, man, where were you when I was testing this thing? <3

The source code is trapped on a dying hard drive (so sci-fi!) but I really need to get it off of there and fix a lot of broke. Not being able to disambiguate the cup is terrible, I am a terrible coder and a terrible person. Also, “pepperoni pizza” is not recognized as the pizza, when what it needs to do is call you out for being someone who types “pepperoni pizza” when you could just type “pizza.” There is also a bunch of commentary I forgot to include.

[spoiler]

The ichthyosaur is only mentioned in the intro text. You carved it into the floor of the test chamber when someone slipped up and let you have a knife. This is funny to me for multiple reasons.

That is really weird.

Ugh! I know! So terrible!

OKAY HOW DO I NOT HAVE A RESPONSE FOR THIS WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME

Ugh, yeah, this is a thing that happens when you… I don’t remember. But I did it a lot, and I guess I missed one. (Is this the only one?)

Note to self: change this to “Oh boy oh boy oh boy, it used to be bacon!”

Yeah, I thought about this, and decided the odds of a new player finding the egg first were maybe fairly low, and that I am lazy and didn’t want to deal with it. It’d be really cool to have a lot of data on the order in which new players find the food items. I assigned them a rather arbitrary easiest-to-hardest order for use in the hint system (beef, Dr. Bagel, peanut brittle, pizza, pie, bacon, corn, vinegar, egg, bean/beer/garlic bread, cauliflower/chowder, pears, cake, if you’re curious), but now I think I was maybe on crack when I did that.

Not even sure how I’d change the egg joke, to be honest. The afterthoughtiness of the egg smashing came about because that action also needed to provide a lot of information about the flashlight; it was organic, not artificial. If I replace it with anything, that also needs to be a joke, because I have joke OCD.

This bacon is basically the bane of my existence. We are talking long nights crying by the record machine here.[/spoiler]

Thanks a bunch! And thanks for the feedback! : D

Jenni

5

Oh, I’m always around; he says mysteriously. Feel free to stalk up my email address (I’m on GitHub, so it’s easy) and bounce any future games off me; I’ll enjoy it, anyway. :slight_smile:

[spoiler]

Ohhh. Okay. (I suppose I have been outed as the sort of person who doesn’t fully engage with the intro text.)

This was the only one I spotted. At least, I think it was. (I also didn’t fully engage with the description of the refrigerator; I didn’t notice the ravings until the cake had arrived, and so ascribed more significance to them than I should have. It was on my second playthrough that I realized they’d been in there the whole time.)

Yeah. I’m a fan of games where they set up a joke (or gun or what-have-you) and then deliver the payoff in the next scene, and I agree that part of the appeal of that sort of thing is that it’s so hard to get right in the presence of a malicious player. :slight_smile:[/spoiler]

6

Ugh, yeah, this is a thing that happens when you… I don’t remember. But I did it a lot, and I guess I missed one. (Is this the only one?)
[/quote]
Some general stuff that helped me a ton…

Juhana Leinonen’s great extension

inform7.com/extensions/Juhana%20 … index.html

can help with this, e.g. TRY TASTING, or other verbs. The problem is to remember to retry this. Or it is for me. I find myself saying “Sure, I already ran that test…(before implementing 20 more objects.)”

If you feel like a bad person, so do I. I played your game and don’t think I sent a transcript.

By the way, dropbox (or some other file sharing service) is great to back up source files. Great peace of mind for me.

7

That’s a bit extreme isn’t it? Considering that the fix is quite simple!