I have a high curiosity about them. From my audience perspective, I have a feeling these are the games I least have any idea of what they’ll be like, compared to the other Iron CHIF episodes.
In the pilot, both chefs articulated a ton. In episode 1, @lpsmith shared a ton, and even if @Afterward was kind of, shall we say, cryptic, one thing there was he’s got a huge back catalogue, so probably even without meaning to your brain would hark back to that. At least mine did.
This time, I feel maximally like I won’t know 'til the curtains are yanked. I’ve played one game from each chef, and one was a projection from Hitchhiker’s Guide, and the other was a Twine adaptation of their own parser game.
That must be my fault. Let me check, and thanks for pointing out the problem…
EDIT: Yes, it was due to my copy/paste error that duplicated part of the URLs. The play online links should be working now. Sorry about that, everyone!
Unfortunately I had a bug in it which would crash the game (or actually get stuck in an infinite loop) whenever players wanted to do the actual swap. It is most aggravating to learn that the bug was actually easy to fix, but somehow I totally missed it… I replaced the swapping logic, redesigned the way things were tracked, and generally wasted two days on getting things to work, obviously looking in the wrong places. And it was not even that much code!
I sent an updated version to @otistdog, hopefully it will be made publicly available soon. Without the Activate command (actually swapping all entities in the time swap queue) the game cannot be completed, I apologize for the inconvenience.
For the Dr Who game, I saw a lot of interesting areas and objects. I couldn’t interact with them besides marking them, but I see from above that the main interaction of the game is disabled for now (but will be back later). I’ll definitely wait for a later version before rating on IFDB.
For Max’s game, I’ve been able to solve 3 or so puzzles but am not sure how to finish, if anyone has any suggestions. I have already gotten the key card, returned the money in the vault to the past, and prevented my past self from discovering my portals. I tried going out of the airlock but died. So what should I do now?
On a separate note:
I made a game about this in Dialog! Called The Impossible Stairs. I did it the way you mentioned of tracking the location of each object. It has a ton of code like this:
(on every tick)
(TimeAge $CurrentTime)
*($object sceneryObj)
($object sitsin $destination)
(if)($object age $CurrentTime)(then)
(now)($object is #in $destination)
(else)
(now)($object is #in #Limbo)
(endif)
I’m going to check out your two code versions, it’d be fun to see a different way of implementing it!
I think I need some Arkenon hints. I’m personally at a low ebb at the moment and it’s giving me sludge-brain, but I’d like to get further in this game during the judging period. I’ll ask a question in the summary tag.
Summary
So I’ve worked out the basics - space travel takes you 2 squares. You can go forward and back in time. I just can’t put a crack in reaching the bridge without dying (trying to get the key, I presume). It’s always death to enter the lab or loading bay in any of the earlier days. The dorms give wriggle room on earlier days but I still just die entering the bridge if I try. What can I do here?
I wish I had a more granular hint here - maybe Brian does? But here’s what I did:
There’s one window where you can time-jump to the loading dock in the 9th, immediately go SE to the bridge, and have just enough time to go back to the future. I just used SCAN and a ton of UNDO-scumming to figure it out - the cycle counter was a little broken for me since I think it read like 14 or 15 out of 12.
There are two hints for this in the game. The first is when you get the cash:
>get dollars
That is one hell of a lot of cash. However, you admit that physical money like
this is very valuable especially considering the electronic variant of Altairian
Dollars have collapsed, so you gather it all into your all-encompassing arms and
stand up. Now, just to get this timeline back into order…
And the second is the description of what set off the plot in your diary.
I think you did the wrong thing with the cash!
There’s a few things you can do:
Go back in time in the airlock. Scan the ship every turn, and notice what happens. Note that I think there’s a bug in the reported ‘Time’: it says X/12, and X slowly counts up forever; I think it was intended to count to 12 and reset.
Remember that the destination of every portal changes when you manipulate the artifact (and that you can have multiple portals).
In general, the log book lays out your goals, though indirectly.
Okay, I think I completely misunderstood the game, I had no idea that you could go to more than one day since when I tried making a past portal in the past it just killed me. I’ll try this again tomorrow!
on Time swap, my eye-of-beholder (that is, useless) opinion of an Historian: I feel that figuring what is to be marked is a tad too easy… for an historian, that is.
Concur and agree with severedhand: in general, I feel that the first puzzle, which is a sort of tutorial perhaps deserve some more cluing (clueling ? sorry for the possible bad english…)
Oh man, heartbreaking. Also enjoyed wandering around the timeline marking Every Damn Thing. I got the sense the intended puzzle was the rubics cubing of anomalies, rather than sussing out where everyone needed to go? Matched my maps to the preview pic, no lies detected! :]
I am reluctant to vote, given I sous chef’d for the Iron ChIF, but am still amazed what is possible in just 5 days!
What a nail-biting episode, and what a difficult contest to judge! It hurts the soul seeing key components of the dish not make it to the plate, and for all Time Swap’s clear potential—I was delighted when I realized I needed to find bodies of water to travel through—I have to vote based on what was presented to the judges. Arkanen has its technical problems (the broken cycle counter makes things hard that should be easy), but in the end it’s complete, and Time Swap isn’t.
I’m going to hold off on any further thoughts until the post-comp releases come out and I can play both games to completion exactly as the chefs intended! Then I’ll talk about the actual gameplay and story.
I’ve voted for Arkanen both because of its dense puzzle quality and also because we unfortunately didn’t get to see the meatiest bit of Timeswap.
I had speculation about Timeswap’s mechanic but I don’t think it’s worth dwelling on too much because soon we’ll have the real thing. I was wondering how the queue will work? It can accept lots of entries; so is it going to swap A with B, then C with D? Will things be swapped in place or will the player’s location figure in? How will an odd number of things in the queue work? We’ll find out.
In Arkanen, (don’t read my comments unless you’ve played:
Summary
in contrast to lpsmith’s judgment comment about lack of lore-spreading, I do like that the whole lore is in one place. This is a small, dense and intense game, and to me it reminds me of the text carved in a grain of rice aesthetic. Everything is microscopic – the spatial jumps, the time manoeuvres, people being one room away from each other. I see the diary as a grain of rice with everything in it.
I was not as observant as @lpsmith in noticing that there may be a bit of a lack of fluidity in terms of how you can avoid other characters. Though there were times I’d be flapping around undoing and tweaking like crazy, and sometimes I wasn’t sure how but I’d end up where I wanted to be. Sometimes fixing a bug is like that. You have 10 moving parts and you can’t express in words exactly where they all need to be, but you poke at the parts until you see what you want happen. (At least for me.)
I’ve seen various players mention challenges with avoiding people in Arkanen, but funnily enough, I managed to complete the game without ever seeing anyone. I got the item needed in the past and completed the final sequences without running into anyone else. Perhaps after flailing about so much in the first part of the game, shooting myself into the void of space, I had suffered enough to figure out the correct sequence.
My quick math is that there are 21 rooms in the game if we count their multiple versions. Eleven versions are deadly to be in, I’m gonna say maybe 60% of the time on average. The storage room can be deadly, but I’ll call it a lower-danger anomaly because it’s not a thoroughfare and you don’t need to revisit it, either. But the game is designed to make the right way hard to hit, even if you’re trying. So it’s not just like we’d expect 100 minus 60% = 40% success rate by chance. It must be less than that.
I think I’ve only seen one person other than you @Joey say they got the two main items without dying on the first run, so out of all who’ve played, I don’t know if that’s about what you’d expect from chance in this setup, or better. Plenty would’ve been like me, using hundreds of moves.
