Thank you for pointing that out. As someone who has never authored a parser game, I only thought about the difficulty of actually writing multiple descriptions for different time periods – I never realised displaying them properly in a game with an underlying world model can be its own challenge! In Twine, I would simply wrap all of the descriptions in an if/else statement. It turns out no world model can make certain things easier (but often it’s the opposite. Building a simple inventory for a puzzle game in Twine is a lot of work, and it took me like 5 games to do in a reasonable manner. Learning from scratch, in my first games, like Lux and even the 4x4 games, I mostly resorted to a disgusting amount of if/elses, because that was the one hammer I discovered early).
Now that I think of it, if I was writing a game with rooms, puzzles and time travel in Twine, if there were many changes between time periods, I could make the same room in each era a separate passage in editor, and the player would never know – the names displayed would be the same, because they don’t have to be passage names. I could also use “widgets” (Twine macros) for objects/puzzles that appear in different eras, or even include certain passages (like an interactive object that never changes, no matter the time period) in other passages. Is separating rooms like that possible in ZIL (and other parser systems), or does the underlying world model prohibit, for example, two areas with the same name?
I also see things are heating up for our contestants. If I were them, I would already be looking for the time-bending artifact in real life, to buy myself an extra couple of development days – but they’re probably too honourable for that! I’m in awe of the Challenger being bold enough to learn the cooking methods while working on the dish, and I admire Iron Chef’s sportsmanlike willingness to help his competitor.
That’s interesting to me, because I always have the name ready before I start working on a game. With a couple of my games, I actually came up with a name first, and I thought it was good enough it deserved a game. Sometimes, the name is all I have for a long, long time 