Iron ChIF: Season One Episode 3 (Audience Commentary)

[FLACRabbit]

@Draconis

So I would read Amë as “ah-may” /a.me/ or “ay-mee” /ej.mi/ rather than “aim” /ejm/.

The first option is exactly what I had in mind.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

Pronunciation aside, I am pleased to see that Adventuron can handle Unicode characters. Even in 2026, support varies a lot between development systems—I believe TADS is at the top of the pile, with full astral plane support, while Dialog and Inform 6 can only handle the BMP and Inform 7 (currently) only Latin-1. Given the retro aesthetic, I fully expected Adventuron to be limited to some variant of ASCII. (I spent part of this afternoon wrestling with the character set limitations of the Apple II, and would love to leave those limitations far in the past…)

[severedhand]

@FLACRabbit

 describe_suggested_topics: subroutine {
      : gosub "subtract_covered_topics";

Ah, GOSUB. That word takes me back to my Apple II programming as a kid.

My dad started teaching me BASIC and I remember him commenting early on, ‘Having a lot of GOSUBs is the sign of a good program.’ He didn’t elaborate as I was too young to understand that subroutines demonstrate efficiency. I didn’t get GOSUB. I didn’t know what a subroutine was.

Cut to forty years later: I was at an Apple II users event, showing part of a game I’d written thirty years before that called Alien Exodus, and someone at the event looked at the first line of the program, which was like

GOTO 10000

and he laughed and joked, ‘Worst program ever!’

I explained that the earlier lines in Applesoft BASIC run faster than later ones, so it was best to have subroutines at the front and one-off initialisation down near the end.

Now I was the master.

-Wade

[Warrigal (Garry Francis)]

There hasn’t been much audience commentary up to this point, so I’d just like to add some observations.

I’ve just tested a very early version of the Iron ChIF’s entry. I won’t say anything about the game itself, but I couldn’t find any spelling or grammar errors and had to try really hard to find any bugs. That’s not surprising, given her history of solid implementation.

I haven’t seen the challenger’s entry yet, but I did test his/her first Adventuron game a week or so ago and it was also very well implemented.

I think we’ve got a real competition on our hands, folks. Good luck to both competitors.

[otistdog]

@Ally

Coincidentally her closing remarks reference a related post (Make IF Fast) by our very own esteemed judge

I had forgotten that J. Robinson Wheeler was an editor for (and contributor to) IF Theory Reader (aka “the IF Theory Book”), which also has contributions from Andrew Plotkin, Emily Short, Graham Nelson, Jon Ingold, and many other notable authors of the early hobbyist era such as our guest chairman.

It’s available for free at the IF Archive.

[lpsmith (Lucian Smith)]

@FLACRabbit

The code behind the conversations themselves isn’t anything particularly special. It’s basically just a giant if-else_if chain for each NPC:

      : else_if (current_topic == 3) {
         : print "\"Why do you think nobody wants to leave the town?\"\n\"Who told you that? I'm going to leave the town as soon as I get enough money to make having moved here worthwhile,\" he says.\n\"Is that so,\" you say.\n\"As for the others, I think they're all too weak-willed to really face the prospect of change.\"";
      }
      : else_if (current_topic == 5) {
         : print "\"Do you happen to know much about the Prophet?\"\n\"No. I don't go to the Temple and I stay as far away from him as possible.\"\nYou nod.";
         : collection_push collection="relevant_topics" value="2";
      }

I probably shouldn’t comment on this in the main thread, since I’m just the MC, not a judge, but this amused me, because it feels the same as how I handled the language puzzle in my own Edifice, lo these ages past. It was a giant series of nested switch statements. I suppose there’s only so many ways to code up ‘if the player says this, reply with this, otherwise if the player says the other, reply with this, otherwise…’

[rovarsson]

---

Panting and wheezing, Abbot Lobsang settled down on his prayer mat. That last throw, or more specifically, the task that it had demanded of him, had all but drained the last of his strength. Gathering enough pebbles from the river bed to balance a full-grown ox-cow and her calf on a rickety scale had been today’s duty, assigned to him when he had looked up the 2/5 seven the Dice had shown this morning in the Holy Serpentine Script of Randomisation.

To be honest, Abbot Lobsang had been doubting his sacred calling lately. The Snake God had seemed a sympathetic deity at first, very human-like in His fumbling-and-bumbling approach to His Godly Power and Responsabilities. Over the years however, this sometimes laughably error-prone little deity had somehow, through no particular merit of his own, risen high in the Divine Hierarchy, so high that His Holy Haphazardness was threatening the stability of life in the Valley. The silliness of this morning’s task showed but the more innocently eccentric side of Abbot Lobsang’s service to His Hissing Holiness. Yesterday’s Dice-throw ordering him to throw a cobra in the palace window of the King’s two-month-old heir was of much more serious consequence.

Abbot Lobsang truly wished there was a way to topple his once-beloved God, but He had risen too high to be threatened by mere mortal intervention.
Except…
Abbot Lobsang was bonded to the Dice, and through Them to the Snake God. But that bond went two ways… Tales of old found in ancient tomes told of Abbots curbing the Snake God’s eccentric and destabilising powers, although they were more feeble in those days.

Snake Eyes… He had to throw Snake Eyes to stand a chance of going against the will of the Snake God and discarding these Dice of life-controlling randomness. But it would take some careful preparation of circumstances to circumvent the Dice’s inherent resistance (some would say “loadedness”) against landing on a number so deleterious to Their Fork-Tongued Master.

[Melisande]

@jrobinsonwheeler

I was just fooling about with Adventuron and trying to trick it into keeping some sort of transcript.

I don’t think it’s a very well documented feature, but you can use the TSTART command to begin a transcript, which you can end and save with TSTOP. No copy-pasting or taking screenshots required!

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

And, crucially, you can enter the TSTOP even after the game has restarted (which it seems like Adventuron games do after ending).

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

@FLACRabbit

0.5 * a * t^2 = 4 ft
a = 32 ft/s^2 (approximately)
16 * t^2 ft/s^2 = 4 ft
16 * t^2 = 4 s^2
t^2 = 0.25 s^2
t = 0.5 s

So this is determining how long it takes for something to fall to the ground when it’s dropped (not thrown) from a height of four feet. The answer is about half a second. Is the magic trying to intercept something dropped by an antagonist before it hits the ground? Was the chef trying to figure out if the protagonist could react fast enough to stop it?

Also, I decided to test this with a roll of paper towels. My experimental results match the chef’s theoretical predictions to within a reasonable margin of error.

[Melisande]

@Ally

At first glance I really thought this was some ancient runic script!

If you enjoy games in ancient scripts, I suggest you keep an eye on this year’s IFComp entries. As teased here, one of the games will be completely playable in a script not used for thousands of years!

[lpsmith (Lucian Smith)]

@jjmcc

Fellow judges, audience, competitors (if you have time), what tools have you created/appropriated to do the least rewarding work of TYPO/GRAMMAR checking?

I have found the simplest method to be to create an exhaustive transcript, then run that through a spell checker, and read it over for grammar. I also hand it to my wife, who is an excellent editor, and who is happy to point out infelicitous turns of phrases and other problems.

The only issue is that there’s a certain amount of expected repetition that comes in a game that seems weird to her in a transcript. “You sure do talk about spiders a lot”, she said, about a phrase that comes up every time you travel from one room to another in my WIP. It’s the sort of thing that disappears into the background when you’re a player, but looks really weird to her as a reader.

[Ally (Allyson Gray)]

Oh, the transcript approach sounds labour-intensive but seems like a great idea! I feel like catching typos and small grammar issues is the kind of thing that beta-testers in general can also be very helpful for.

For future projects I’ve personally been considering a script to extract only the text strings, which could help sidestep the problem of spell-checkers throwing false positives all over the place when you try to feed them raw source code. The biggest downside I can think of is that it wouldn’t fully capture all the sentences that are only assembled during gameplay, e.g. those that include [one of] or [the noun]…

P.S.: I’m eagerly looking forward to Lucian’s upcoming spider-themed game!^[1]

---

1. The Webifice? ↩︎

[Warrigal (Garry Francis)]

From the testing trenches:

How on Earth do you write a game in five days and still have time to get it tested? Easy. Find a tester that lives on the other side of the planet! If I remember correctly, Iron ChIF @dee_cooke lives in Wales and I live in New South Wales, so she posts updates before going to bed and I test them during the day and get the feedback to her for when she wakes up in the morning.

We’ve been through four rounds of testing so far. In version 0.0.1, we had a complete game, but no title, no title screen and no hints. I found it very difficult because of some moon logic and had to resort to the walkthrough, which I try to avoid when testing.

In version 0.0.2, we had a fully-implemented hint system and the logic behind the main puzzle mechanic was much better clued in game. Also, key words were colour-highlighted in room descriptions, but I still had trouble with the timing of the final puzzle.

In version 0.0.3, we had a game title, title screen and graphics, not just in one or two rooms, but in every room. The graphics are very simple, but effective. Our hint-giving NPC also appears in the graphics whenever he gives a hint. Love it! However, a couple of the major puzzles were broken where they were previously working in v0.0.2. Oh dear, will there be time to fix it?

In version 0.0.4 (just moments ago), all the bugs were fixed. Houston, we have lift-off!

My hat goes off to both the challenger (lots of music) and the Iron ChIF (lots of graphics). Which one will present the more delectable dish when they’re served?

[severedhand]

@Warrigal

If I remember correctly, Iron ChIF @dee_cooke lives in Wales and I live in New South Wales

So if she ever came here, she would say, ‘This reminds me of the southern end of where I live, but newer.’

-Wade

[Warrigal (Garry Francis)]

@severedhand

'This reminds me of the southern end of where I live, but newer.’

Exactly.

[dee_cooke]

North East England rather than Wales, but yes the timezone difference lined up very nicely!

[EJoyce (Emery Joyce)]

I write my games in Visual Studio Code, so I use a spellcheck plugin for that program, which can be told to ignore code and can keep project-specific dictionaries for proper names and stuff, which I find incredibly useful. The downside is that sometimes mid-project it updates in such a way that it stops working with my VSC setup for some reason and it can take me a while to notice.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

@lpsmith

Here we are, now; entertain us! We’re your tasters; you’re courageous.

I always thought it was “here we are now, in containers”. But I suppose Adventuron doesn’t have those…

[otistdog]

FYI, anyone who gets through the two dishes and is looking for still more in the way of appetizers before IFComp can check out @Piergiorgio_d_errico’s impromptu short game produced this week.