Release 3 (The Final Cut) Of Andromeda Awakening is halfway through being done.
The final cut will contain: additional content (different beginning, more puzzles in the mid-game, a complete new area in the end-game), a hint system (maybe, tbh), a revision on many puzzles to make the experience less of a struggle and much more trivia, for in my opinion the original story doesn’t tell all the truth…
My question. Is it right I release this as a version 3 or would it be more fair if it is Andromeda Awakening - The Final Cut, with release 3 (to link it to the previous, IFComp releases), but in a different IFDB page?
I think it depends on what you want. Do you want next players will play only your “final cut” or you want to show the progress between the 2 versions (as two different games).
I don’t think the problem is about fairness. The competition has ended.
Yeah, in my opinion these are two different releases, maybe two different games. Like Apocalypse Now and Apocalypse Now Redux. So I’d rather put it on a different page.
You don’t HAVE to play the original, as it is flawed. But of course there is a link and it should be evident. (Maybe the name by itself will be enough?). And, of course, I don’t wanna make the original version, which actually placed 17th in the 17th IFComp, to vanish. It is my first game. A sort of memento. Dunno
I don’t know, though, if there is a kind of method people are used to when delivering such a kind of upgrade. 'Cause I don’t wanna break the habits.
Well, there are two versions of Curses available at IFDB - the z3 version and the z5 version. Does that sort of answer your question? Because the z5 version, like your “final cut”, contains tons more than the original z3 version.
^^I was wondering about that myself. Does one normally create two separate pages if you want to release similar-but-not-identical versions of the game in multiple formats, or do they go on the same page?
I think, if it’s really-very-different, there’s certainly nothing wrong with drawing attention to the really-very-differentness by giving it a variant title and cover, etc. As someone pointed out above, fairness isn’t a factor one way or another.
I think it generally depends whether you want people to play the old version (which, of course, will still be available on the archive). If you want the new version to be the definitive version, I’d put it in on the same page.
If we’re just talking about something as small as a version, then yeah, absolutely. But if it’s functionally a different game evolved from an earlier one, the question opens (not to any definite answer, but I think is really becomes an open question, and the author’s prerogative).
I personally wouldn’t like to IFDB to be clogged with games in different versions, no matter how large the changes are. While certainly different pages for one game don’t harm me physically or monetarily, I’m pretty sure nobody’s gonna download and play the outdated version, so I’d prefer to have them downloadable on the page of the latest version for historical reasons (and I’d never DL them, why should I?). But that’s just my personal opinion.
Well, indeed the majority of players probably won’t, but you can’t really speak for everyone. I tried out Curses.z3 for two reasons: because it was smaller and hopefully less overwhelming, and because the interpreter I was using for playing IF on my mobile then (Z2ME) didn’t work with z5. That’s two good reasons to play an outdated version of that particular game.
Also, I feel like playing Mini-Zork one of these days, because I want to see how far it goes - and I’d like a quick dip back into Zork without going the whole hog.
Just, you know, showing the other side of the coin.
