For the record:
So this is clearly a me problem. I think it’s just that I’ve hit the local storage limit for iplayif.com: this is attested as 5Mbyte, and that figure’s come up before in the Parchment context (1, 2); and Firefox shows 5.1MB of storage used (most of it looks like autosave: keys).
(Maybe there’s something Parchment/iplayif could do to make the failure to save more obvious, but this isn’t the place to discuss that.)
Ah. I never got around to adding autosave removal when localStorage is full, but you could manually remove some files.
And if the game is saying the save was successful, it must be using the older save code. (I don’t remember if this code has actually made it into an I7 release yet.) But it could be manually copied into an older I7 release: https://github.com/ganelson/inform/blob/3c9e0ef592d0ef42e554563448c10baa1bd58887/inform7/Internal/Inter/Architecture32Kit/Sections/State.i6t#L60
I have a save from V1 that isn’t working on V2. Would the game still be beatable? (Here it is, for reference: NGUHD 7 rooftops.sav (87.6 KB))
Reply: Ohhh, thanks! I knew what I had to do but the exact wording wasn’t coming to me.
Yeah, it should be totally beatable! None of the bugs found in V1 lock you out of victory. The only thing that can lock you out of some (midgame) content is putting the shards in the upgrade machine in the wrong order.
In your current save file, the next thing you need to do is SLIDE ON HANGER or PUT HANGER ON WIRE then EAST, etc.
Aw crap, the game finally reset itself, and all my saves have disappeared, too. 
When I posted before, I’d just started, but now it’s been a few weeks and I’d been chipping away at the game without any continuity issues up to this point. I had two rifts mostly done and had started a third. I’m less blase about just restarting now. Can anything be done?
Edit: I happened to go back to the IFDB page and tried hitting Play Online again, since the version information seemed to indicate that version 1 hadn’t been overwritten yet, and it loaded the game up where I had been. I have no idea why my browser reset it on me, but I think I’m okay to continue for now.
Hmm, maybe you should let me know when you finish and I can update the website then!
If you lose anything at some point, I can send you a version with testing commands available. That will let you complete levels the “canonical” way so you can just “test haunted house” “test horror” etc. until you catch up to where you were.
I hope it doesn’t reach that point but that’s probably the best option if you lose everything!
It’s possible you could have ended up on release 2 if your browser had cached the old version of the IFDB page.
(Because r1 moved to a new place on the IF Archive, and we updated the IFDB page to point to that, so that people would still get r1 by default for now; the path where IFDB used to point to now holds r2.)
Glad it’s sorted, anyway.
I’ve been learning to draw recently and I wanted to draw the main antagonist (?) of the game, the woman in the spiked skull mask.
I always imagined metal spikes but nothing I drew looked like my internal vision, so I tried a gauzy circle behind her head like some of Queen Amidala’s stuff from Star Wars and it looked closer to my original vision.
She reminded me of the Shrike from Hyperion. Unfortunately, none of the online images match what I imagined, but if you’ve read it …
(Endgame NGUHD spoilers) To me, she never appeared as an antagonist. She felt like Death as a figure does to me: sad, and honest, and not good - but never evil. Never trying to hurt you. Is that just me?
It’s cool to hear your thoughts on her role, thanks for sharing! I had trouble putting it into words.
Continuing the discussion from What's the best way to market IF/indie games?:
I do still think of putting NGUHD up for sale on itch or steam or iOS app store, so I’ve begun working on art for the game.
Here’s my art for area 8 The floating islands
For those who have played before, does this look like the way you envisaged the area?
For all people, would having Inform display this on the page the first time you enter that area make the game better in your opinion? I could even frame it as Emrys having a notebook that she takes sketches in.
I love it! It fits my envisioning very well, and the negative-image style is perfect. I don’t know if I would say it would make the game better, since I quite enjoyed the text-only version, but I do think it would be a nice complement to the text.
Seconding what Tabitha said. Maybe a little more on the side of it making the game better since I don’t think I really mapped the game on paper and it took a bit for me to understand the shape of that space initially…
It would be great to have images, maybe a different color tint on the images for each area. Okay, going back offline now…
I think the art style perfectly complements the game and what I envisioned when I played this part, it’s really impressive. I like when games’ illustrations are given an in-universe explanation, so having these framed as Emrys’s sketches of the area is a great idea.
Maybe there’s a sketchbook you carry around, and you can choose a page to examine to get the image of the area or subject? An image could show up when first unlocked and you could view it again later. I’m thinking the images would be a toggle if a player wants a purely text experience, but this way, they wouldn’t miss out on art if they decide to enable it midway through. I don’t know what the plans for implementation are, though, so I’m just throwing out ideas.
Thanks, these are both good ideas (tint and text toggle)!
I think using pictures as chapter frontispieces (as opposed to lots of pics covering details) is a good way to please a lot of people.
People who haven’t played before accept the game is how it’s meant to be, and they’re open to seeing a thing the way you’ve drawn it if you present it before they read about it.
People who’ve played already and saw things differently may like pictures less, but again, the less the images cover detail and the more they cover a broader thing, like a chapter or the whole game (the way a book cover does), the less it treads on their vision. That’s assuming they remember how they imagined it at first, too.
I suppose just doing pictures of whatever you like, then including them, isn’t inherently scope-creeping. But it could be if, in play, there are too many longeurs between things you wanted to draw, resulting in you needing to draw more stuff you hadn’t planned to.
I think the angle of the Emrys sketchpad \ idea, the personal quality of it (and of real hand-drawn artwork), could potentially add a little something to the game. It provides a frame that’s more valuable (to people who already played) than just – here’s the game that was already complete, plus some pictures. To people who hadn’t played before, I think it would be read as a good element of the game.
In finicky advice land, I’d try to give the images (at least) minimal prep against each other. Scans often have poor or varying contrast, colour tints, or poor white or black levels. And if you want to see the paper in one, you probably want to see it in all. Or if none in any, then you want none in all. You want to achieve some kind of baseline so they look good in the game and broadly match each other. I expect the graphic design folk around here could give you some pointers.
-Wade
Another note: I wouldn’t have the image as scrollable content. I personally am against that, and it’s only been done well once or twice (eg. RTE). I would generally recommend putting in the time to make it a sidebar thing (or in the status line), like Counterfeit Monkey or, even better, like the BBC 30th Anniversary Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That pulls it off very well (on desktop, not mobile).
Hmm, maybe I’ll just practice longer and get better at drawing and look at graphic design and stuff. As for the layout, I feel like Flexible Windows and windows in general are the most fragile thing between updates, and making it scrollable seems not to ‘break’ very often, but I’ll think about it, since I’m not sure whether I’ll actually put this in or not.
For now, though, it’s a lot of fun to make pictures for each level, so here’s the Wax Museum:
This one is landscape and a different color than the last one. But that’s okay, I think I’m just going to practice first, see what I come up with, and then work on it.
Thanks for all the advice!
