Iron ChIF: Season One Episode 1 (lpsmith vs. Afterward, using Inform 7)

Playing Forum Games, Wordplay, and Challenges
168

Yeah, about that…

I was writing new content until 7:28 PM today. That’s when I wrote the last sentence of the last scene. I literally made myself tear up. Every sentence I wrote, I discovered new things, about the backstory, about the world, about the kind of woman our protagonist was.

You all! She didn’t exist five days ago! Her entire world was ‘mole people? Nah, bird people.’ But I care so much now about what she did and why she did it!

At 7:30, I was utterly emotionally drained. I went to choir practice. I sang, after writing about birdsong.

I was home by 10 to fix the most egregious of bugs. I figured if I really wanted to, I could maybe stay up until 1:00?

It is 4:19 AM. I sent off the final version 23 minutes ago. I am still jittery.

I was indeed polishing! I was alternating pretty heavily between polishing the track behind the train and laying the track in front of it. For the last several hours, @Ally volunteered her time online to help me prioritize polishing the most unsightly blemishes. “What about this?” >fix fix fix< “And this?” >fix fix fix< “This?” >No.< “Please?” >Fine<. She is a saint.

As a result of her prodding, I discovered that I had used stop; in several places. I had thought it meant ‘exit this routine’. It turns out to instead means something more like ‘exit all the routines’. Half of my every turn during [scene] rules just… stopped. Because of someone else’s stop; So many weird things suddenly worked again when I went I instituted a more robust ‘always use otherwise’ rubric. So, so many.

This has been an amazing, amazing week. I can’t even tell you what I thought I expected when I started, but ‘caring about characters I made up’ was not on my bingo card. Maybe it should have been! I’ll have to talk to the bingo card manufacturer; these things are crap.

Thank you all for sharing the time with me. I went into this knowing I wanted to be completely open about everything. Every one of you took that openness and honored it.

I’m proud to be a member of this community.

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169

I’ve spent about two hours on the Chef’s game, which is of impressive length, complexity, and depth of interpretation. Hard to say how far I am, but I’ll give an indication below… and then it’s off to bed for me!

Heavy spoilers ahead! Though I’ll try to make my notes as cryptic as possible.

I have so far visited 22 rooms, excepting only rooms A, F, and S. One suspects that the bed in altered room B would lead to room A, but I haven’t been able to open it yet. I have, I think, pieced together the ‘first letter’ puzzle. I think this is relevant for the clue that X marks the spot. One suspects that the X in question – which is missing from the normal grid, but appears in the suspected solution to the first letter puzzle – must be accessed from room Y, but I am not certain about that. The huge laser also feels relevant, but it seems you can’t do much with it. I wonder if there’s a way to visit altered Noble Gases? Should one count the stars or not? What about the underground / verticality clues? I’ve also just now placed the homunculi, but this did not seem to do anything – but it was the last thing I did before closing, so clearly I need to investigate more.

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