Alright, it’s only been 10 days or so since I looked for alpha testers, but I am going away for the holidays, so I just want to ask for some testers.
The game is a 39-year-late sequel to ‘the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, but was programmed in ZIL, just like the Infocom games. It begins just as the last game ends, on the ramp leading down to the legendary planet of Magrathea.
It requires a z-machine interpreter such as Windows Frotz or Parchment, and the game itself takes 8-10 hours to play through (but like most games of that length, 1-2 hours using a direct walkthrough). Luckily, the first two sections (out of about 11) have already been sandpapered as fine as I think I can get them.
Please send an email to mfouquetogarra@gmail.com instead of on the forum if you would like to test, because I might not be on here and I have an automatic email set up. This means, please don’t send me an email unless you want to test, because the email will give you the password for the link, and this is meant to be a private thing. I’ll try to respond but I probably won’t be able to after a couple of days.
I know you asked people to send emails, but this needs to be on the forum so people know what they’re getting into:
How cruel is the game? Do we need to save early and often and write down how to re-solve puzzles? Also, is there an in-game hint system, or will we need to query you for hints? All of this affects the difficulty and time commitment of the testing process, so people need to know before they sign up.
P.S. A first bug report: It’s supposed to be “The Restaurant” because the first word of a subtitle is always capitalized. I don’t know if that’s a thing in all styles besides APA… but I definitely think it looks grander for a title.
P.P.S… if the game builds on the original Stu Galley Milliways, it probably won’t be eligible to be entered into a competition anyways due to the game not being entered into the competition with the full consent of all authors. I’m not judging you for making the game, but you need to know that.
The game is definitely cruel, though as testers I added some features in to overcome that. There is an Invisiclues™ hint system but I edited it (and didn’t use that name). I haven’t finished the hint system yet.
I asked IFComp. The person stated that it was fine, but still I’m not sure.
Adjacent Topic - I have found some files at an Infocom archive of the official and obviously incomplete Restaurant at the End of the Universe game; but I am not tech savvy enough to get it to work on Frotz. Does anyone here know what I am referring to?
If you can’t open them in Frotz you probably have the source files. There are a couple of compilations of these, one z5 and one z6. They are downloadable from The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog. Download them and then open them in Frotz.
They are very incomplete…
EDIT: You don’t need any extension to open a z5 (or z6) in Frotz.
