The post-iron chIF version of ‘course correction’ is now downloadable! Hmm, if it’s post-iron, does that make this the steel version?
My guiding principle for this release was to fix things that were broken, flesh out things that I had put in but hadn’t fully realized, and address any design issues from the reviews/commentary that I could. This meant:
- When you change perspectives (he said vaguely) almost all the room/item descriptions change, too.
- You now have to use at least two capsae to get through the game.
- There are Even More Ways to use the capsae.
- There are Even More Ways to get captured/injured.
- There are Achievements!
- The ‘other’ endings have been greatly expanded.
I want to talk about the new endings, but of course that will be spoiler-y. But there’s a spoiler tag! So:
The ‘main’ ending of the original game was one of the very first things I ever knew about what the game would be: it was going to build to that point. Which was great for focusing my writing when creating the rest of the game from scratch, but then when I wanted to not force that ending on people, the result was a little flat. One reviewer said that they appreciated them: they were the results of hard decisions made by Constance in a bad situation, and they all made sense. That was exactly what I was aiming for! The ending I originally had in my head was nice and all, but if I was actually Constance in that situation, there wouldn’t be an overwhelming reason to choose it–other options seemed reasonable, too. So every time I wrote an ‘other’ ending, I tried to be as sympathetic to the Constance making that decision as I could, empathizing with them, and working out at least a little of what she’d do from there.
But other reviewers (and, honestly, myself) thought that those endings were so short and obviously non-optimal that they felt sort of like a cop-out. If there’s only one real ending, they groused, don’t pretend like there are a bunch of them. Fair enough!
But I wasn’t sure how, until I finally realized: the reason it was hard to flesh out the other endings is because in all of them, Constance kind of nopes out of the story. For entirely fair reasons! But the solution is to switch to Horatio. ‘Constance noped out; what do you do?’ is an interesting story for Horatio! And that gave me the ‘in’ I needed, and in the end I’m much happier with the entire suite of endings available to the player.
Everything is still on github! So if you want to see what’s changed from the first release to this one, everything is collected at this pull request. Among other things, you can see all the bug fixes for things that my testers actually did report during the comp that I simply had no time to even think about, let alone address. They’re addressed now!
Thanks again to everyone who tested, reviewed, judged, or had passing thoughts about my game. That experience is still a highlight of the year for me. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s been a lot of hard things going on this year, and cocooning myself in a furnace of creativity seems to have kind of inoculated me against a lot of it, and even helped me be a better support person for others. And that wouldn’t have happened without you all (and especially without @otistdog), and I am forever grateful for it.
)
