Oh, good! That’s encouraging to hear. But I’m usually just kind of an anxious, awkward person too, so there’s that to consider. I’m glad to hear if it was just me psyching me out though. I’ve turned out to be pretty good at that and it’s not particularly helpful.
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Three cheers for us anxious, awkward people! The world would be so much less fun without us. I am anxious and awkward, and I do it with panache. By which I mean that I will not vomit on your shoes if my OCD flares up at your party full of suave and self-assured people. I’m sure you have something just as nice to say about your own awkwardness and anxiety.
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I think in the worst case, even if you get out of line, people will tell you, and you’ll be able to correct things.
From what I saw of the review it seemed pretty fair, though I haven’t looked at Fix It.
What I most object to is “Author X obviously didn’t know/had no clue/was careless” sort of things, whether or not Author X had a clue. Especially since when I’ve been on the other end of things and just missed something, or I didn’t know something, and I was glad to have learned it, and I wish I did. And you’re not even close to that.
Keep on writing–we don’t want a mutual admiration society. I also speak from experience when I say an unnecessarily positive review for a game I wind up not liking is probably more deflating than a negative review that preps me a bit.
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Thanks, yeah… well it’s made me who I am, for better or worse.
That’s also true. I’ll keep that in mind going forward.
I think part of my trepidation here too is that like I mentioned in the first post I made in this thread, I’ve had some times where I reviewed something and I either fell into the trap of dismissing it entirely or giving it a death by a thousand cuts more because I either missed something it was doing or because I let my depression write the review for me, which is in hindsight something I’ve regretted every time and I’ve been trying to be careful not to repeat that. Too careful from the sound of the responses I’m getting here.
Thanks again. Couple more reviews to post.
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It’s tough for me, too. I mean, I say “oh yes I need to learn from my mistakes” but on the other hand, a potential mistake that might hurt someone shouldn’t just be “oh, I’ll learn from it.”
One thing I read somewhere, too … we can fool ourselves by trying too hard to avoid something we’re not really much at risk of.
And some time it hit meI know the odds of winning if you buy a lottery ticket, so I don’t. But on other other hand, when the odds are very low of a potential bad outcome, and the odds of a good one are high, I’m still in a bit more fear than I should be of Just Doing Stuff. It was helpful for me to think of things this way. There are other ways to push ourselves, and I think we need more than one. But this (reverse of buying a lottery ticket) was particularly valuable for me to take risks that seemed worthwhile, or that I hoped were worthwhile.
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And ok last one for today because I need to eat and head out for work again soon, here is my review for Baby on Board. Although actually as stated it kind of turned into a bit more of a review of Perplexity, at least the little I’ve seen of it.
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Thanks for your review of The Box. I always like hearing honest opinions about my work both positive and constructive. I’m glad you overall recommended it.
As you surmised, this was as much about testing out Kreate as it was about creating a fun game. I certainly wanted to respect the player’s time and still have a fun experience for them, but yes the story was paper-thin and mostly just a vehicle for puzzles. And in fact, many of the puzzles were tailored to test out some of the more unique things you could do over a pure text-based parser. I’m not sure I would have created a cryptogram or showed a wall of glifs in a text-only adventure.
As for if we need another development system, that does remain to be seen, but I certainly wanted a new one. I’ve been wanting to make a much more complex game with a ton of NPC interactions
and some very complex logic. Every time I dive into the logic of the major Inforum extensions that do the kind of things I want, I bump up into the limitations of the extensions and the limitations of my patience and ability to groc English sentences as computer instructions. I know that plenty of people have done amazing and complex things with Inform and I have the utmost respect for them. 
But my kingdom for an interactive debugger, static typing, modern IDE and refactoring. Time will tell if Kreate will ever amount to anything more than a personal project, but I do at least guarantee that I will produce one major game with it. Then we’ll see if I like it enough to develop it into something more.
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Like I said, nothing against a puzzle-forward work. I’ve written those too. In fact the ending for The Box reminded me a bit of the ending for Gorxungula’s Curse, as they both used the “It was a dream… or was it?” trope to wrap things up.
Cool! I would look forward to that. It is a smooth interface to play in.
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It’s been a week since I last posted, so I thought I’d pop in and mention it looks like it’s going to be even longer until my next review drops. I’m still adjusting to the second job (and doing training modules for it when I get home, plus other homework stuff), and the first job still has my attention on weekends.
Between the two I hope I can still find the time to play and review a bit more. There are at least six titles that I’m still eager to get to from what I’ve seen in reviews (I mean, I’m eager to play them all but if I had to narrow it down), but with about a week and a half left and given my other stuff and being tired like all the time now, I’m hoping I can maybe review half of them during the festival. Some I’ll have to play and write about afterward. Not to mention getting some reviews out for the ones I tested.
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Hey, I got bogged down too and didn’t even have a new job to blame!
I think it’d be very nice to have reviews trickling in after Spring Thing is done. Too often we can say “oops, the comp is over, missed my chance” but that isn’t really the case. There’s always time to write a review or whatever, and I know I enjoyed reading other authors’ postmortems well after IFComp ended.
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Springtime has been incredibly busy for me too, but I was determined to put out a few reviews this year and so far I’ve managed three. As an author I know how valuable reviews are, and hopefully I’ll manage a few more before the competition closes. I’ve really enjoyed reading everyone else’s.
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