Holy crap the ice broke on IFComp discussion! While I find it increasingly hard to break away from my WIP - coding apparently is my zen space? - I do look forward to dipping back into the review/discussion pool this year. I may just be giddy.
"Be <<one of>>very afraid<<or>>excited<<or>>annoyed <<or>>ambivalent<<or>>eye rolling<<at random>>"
I didnât have a hair-raising race to the deadline like a lot of you, but thatâs because I had my hair-raising race last year, and lost the race. I did, however, add a sizable cutscene mid game on the day before the deadline.
Regarding leftover cheat commands, I kept a special bailout verb, which allows you to compile and execute new TADS code in-game. That way, if the worst comes to pass and a player discovers a grave error hours into their particular build, I may be able to give them a few code lines that might fix the problem without rebuilding and losing saved games.
Yes, I did add couple of endings yesterday night, plus re-did some of the initial scene triggers in extremely hacky and inelegant ways because the systematic, elegant way I had designed and implemented before was systematically and elegantly not working. Every game in my portfolio has been an attempt to use more scenes and be a marginally more elegant designer, but alas, elegance eludes me, I shall remain a hack.
Like others here have said, I am very much looking forward to the comp chatter. Perhaps itâs what Iâve been missing the most.
EDIT: Also all hail Mathbrush, who has valiantly soldiered through my use of table rows as scene timers. Itâs a bad idea, kids, donât do it at home.
Are you planning to fix it after the judging opens, or is that not an option?
Congrats all!
I got mine all packaged up and finalised on Wednesday 21st IIRC. Ten minutes afterwards I realised âcan the player do this action at this point in the story, which would print a response thatâs critically embarassingly wrong?â And they could. So I fixed that and the related bugs I found while testing that, reuploaded on Saturday, and have not looked at the game since. Any more stupid bugs Iâll just have to take on the chin.
Not yet certain if thatâs an option, but if so, Iâm aiming to get it fixed.
Wooooo⌠I didnât know this sort of thing was possible!
Well said! I feel your pain there. Best way to fail, of course, systematically and elegantly!
In TADS itâs called a dynamic function⌠has proved pretty amazing through the development process! Not sure if there is an Inform equivalent?
If there isnât, this sort of functionality might actually get me to try TADS, tbh.
Love to have you 
The simplest use case might be something like: the playerâs gone into a room and the game wonât let them exit because it glitchishly thinks thereâs a condition that needs to be fulfilled. With the DynamicFunc you can just enter
âconditionToPass = trueâ or even
âplayerChar.moveTo (theExitRoom)â right on the command line, and voila. Thatâs the simplest case, though⌠you can rewrite entire methods or create new objects too.
Itâs just wild to me that you could write a game that has command line access to the protagonist, as a part of the game. And its not just, oh, yeah, you have this magic wand that changes objects, like, say Counterfeit Monkey, you instead are literally granting source access to create an object that didnât exist before, during the gameplay. There are a ton of potential uses for this rather than emergency bug fixes (a completely valid use, though).
It would be even better if they would fix the title before the games are released, because otherwise it could cause confusion when people see it under the old title, go to vote, and canât find the title on the ballot. Either way, good luck!
Yep, in theory, you could fire up my game, create yourself a new Actor, customize them how you like, and have them follow you around all game 
Edit: not theory⌠I just tried it.
Seconded! 
We also have true runtime object instantiation! 
Donât know how many of a kind of object you will need? No problem! The player can also manage collections of objects pretty intuitivelyâŚ!
And with HTML TADS 3, you natively have the majority of features that Vorple has, all in one contained game file!
Itâs happened enough times that I now know itâs a pattern: I get great IF story ideas in late August.
I love the rush to a deadline. I love being able to shove aside non-urgent tasks in my real life.
Iâve been writing a long, long time (first time I entered here was 2015 I think, and I was writing novels for many years before that) and Iâm a little ashamed that I cleary have the self-control to write novels but not to do them in a sensible time frame. But I guess I can reinterpret that as, âI have honed my PROCESS to a fine artâ if I want to try to be positive about it.
Iâve found at least 10 coding errors since the deadline, so I guess Iâll be updating a LOT this year.
Oh well. I suppose the main thing is to create a game that is as good as it can be.
I was very interested to submit my game/story to the competition, but the guidelines required me to submit a âform of intentionâ first, deadline of Sept 1 I think. That little requirement should be noted somewhere because I was disappointed to learn that made the story deadline but missed the Intention form deadline.
The schedule does list the intent to enter date. Scroll down to the Competition schedule subhead.
I donât think it changes very much from year to year.
