Ryan Veeder's Authentic Fly Fishing

That’s an excellent idea! I decided to start out with the basics (autosaving a tiny linear game) with a blog post HERE, and I’ll try to do a followup with fancier mechanics later—although I’m sure one can extrapolate those fancier mechanics from the base case…

4 Likes

Thank you! This is exactly the sort of info I wanted to see spelled out. I also look forward to your subsequent posts, time and will permitting.

1 Like

Well, I reached the introductory message that says:

Summary

This is going to be the last special introductory message. Thanks again for playing.

I don’t know what else there is to say.

If you have any specific questions or feedback, I hope you’ll contact me, via email (rcveeder@me.com) or Twitter (@rcveeder), so I can find out what you think.

Actually, you know what? If you’ve played for this long, you HAVE to contact me. You are obligated to let me know that you saw this message, so that I can know that a player like you actually exists. Okay? Please?

If you’re reading this and deciding to ignore my request, I will—Well, I’ll never find out, I guess. But if I somehow do find out, I will be very ticked off at you.

I feel like I have to note the fact here (that should suffice, since the author is in this thread). I don’t feel comfortable defying such strict orders.

As for the game itself, I’m still having fun, mainly because I know there’s something I need to find in order to make further progress, and I’m confident it’ll turn up eventually if I look under the right rock. I did find some very interesting reading material, which also serves as a clever way to keep the player coming back day after day.

2 Likes

Thank you!!!

Here’s the followup to the Basic Autosaving blog post. I plan to do one more post on autosaving techniques; let me know if you have any questions I should answer in it.

1 Like

You can see another example of this general technique with Kerkerkruip: Kerkerkruip Persistent Data.i7x

3 Likes

I find this game incredibly fascinating and I’ve made a thread (with lots of spoiler tags!) to discuss the plot and theories.

1 Like

I played a little last night. The game is pretty cool. I had no idea that adding objects to a text adventure was possible while keeping save games intact. I had no idea it was possible to save progress on-line in text adventures like this. These are two pretty cool technological achievements!

But also, this is the first positive experience I’ve ever had with fishing, as in the real world it either results in me not catching any fish (and being a failure) or a dead fish, which is also a kind of failure for the fish. I didn’t think it was possible to have fun with this topic. I hope the sequel is about talking politics at Thanksgiving. I haven’t even properly fished yet in the game and I’m already liking it a lot! I hope people click the link and check it out.

3 Likes

Spoiler for the phone booth.

Okay, I painstakingly decrypted one of the “secret messages” the way one does the Cryptoquotes puzzle in the newspaper (if the key is given somewhere, I didn’t find it) and finally was able to read: “A man goes to the doctor and says he’s horribly depressed. The doctor says, ‘Ah, but you could be doing a lot worse. Consider the case of Pagliacci the Clown, who died fifteen years ago.’”

Where do I apply for my refund?

Also, I’ll say it again: there really needs to be a way to copy and upload save files. I’m starting to get nervous about all my progress being somewhere in AppData or someplace where I don’t know how to back it up. (I haven’t figured out how to make @cpb’s method work for importing the data yet.)

This game is weird and makes me feel uncomfortable by altering my playstyle.

Which makes me think it’s great.

I just met Malcolm and now I’ve dropped a lot of my assumptions. I tried this for like 15 minutes last year and didn’t get anywhere. Following this thread has finally got me to try it again. Thanks for making it sound exciting!

ha ha ha ha. I love the phone booth.

Dumb question: Does the noise you hear when you get onto the jetty lead to anything? I’ve tried lots of things at various times and I never figured out whether it was a puzzle I was supposed to solve or not.

With someone’s help via PM, I was able to confirm that I can manually back up and restore save data, which makes me feel better about continuing to put time into this.

Can someone confirm that the grabber claw can not be used to grab the “blue spot” that’s visible below the footbridge? It doesn’t seem to be working, but I want to make sure I’m not failing a “guess the verb” test.

Whoa. For a long time, I’ve assumed I had a mostly complete map. But if the developer notebook I got a sneak peek at while cleaning the beach is to be trusted, I’ve actually discovered less than half of the rooms! Good grief.

(Not necessarily true if the total includes the very extensive woods northeast of the lodge, but those don’t appear to be individually crafted rooms.)

Another possible (albeit minor) bug report: I just reloaded the game (for the first time in a long while) and got this message immediately after examining the jacket, which was my first move:

Hey, sorry to interrupt, but it looks like you've been playing for a little over half an hour. That's great to hear! I'm glad you're enjoying Ryan Veeder's Authentic Fly Fishing and I hope you continue to do so.
 
Ryan Veeder's Authentic Fly Fishing is designed to be played in short sessions over the course of multiple days, so I feel like I should gently encourage you to find a good place to stop, so you can return to Ryan Veeder's Authentic Fly Fishing tomorrow, or whenever you have time. But I can't force you to do anything. Play for as long as you want, and come back whenever you want. All your progress has automatically been saved.

Thanks for playing! Okay, back to the game.

This was after the game for had been loaded for less than a minute.

That is wild. Did you happen to reload on the anniversary of the last time you played?

1 Like

I can’t say for sure, because a browser crash a few months ago caused me to lose my browsing history. My map and notes file were last modified on July 24, 2021, but it’s possible I played on August 21 and made no progress.

I have also reached the “last introductory message.” Unfortunately, I feel a bit stuck. I only have five badges so far. I’ve skimmed through the other threads on the game, but generally everyone is much farther and there’s a lot of discussion of things I haven’t been able to do or haven’t seen yet.

Some things I’ve done:

  • Explored the boundaries of the woods

  • Observed most of the birds

  • Read most of the wet notebook

  • Met the rat

  • Talked to Zuleika

  • Searched the cabin

Some things I want to do:

  • clean up the beach - no gloves!

  • get inside the observatory

  • find the rat a drink so he’ll actually talk to me

  • find keys to unlock sheds

  • get to the shed guarded by wasps (they didn’t go away the way the moose did!)

Any tips for where I should be looking next?

1 Like

Some hints for your todo list:

  • You can clean up the[/spoiler] beach, [spoiler]but you use something else to pick up the rubbish. I think it’s near the tool you need for the observatory.

  • You need to find a gardening tool to get into the observatory.
  • Keep searching for a drink! I found it quite late.
  • Check inside everything. Not everything is locked, and there are keys for most things. But not the filing cabinet, so don’t worry when you can’t open that.
  • Wasps - You can protect yourself against the wasps with the appropriate clothing (but I think you’ll need keys first)

Some general hints - look on and in everything. I missed something because I didn’t examine the surfaces in a room.

Do you have any badges yet? Have you worked out that you can tidy up your cabin and it puts things back the way they were?

1 Like

Yes, I’ve noticed that searching even unlikely-looking surfaces and containers sometimes turns up interesting things.

I said I had five in the previous post, but now I’ve found two more. I also have worked out how to go canoeing, which is quite helpful for understanding the layout of the place.

Yes, that’s helpful, but with my tendency to carry everything around because I don’t know when I might need something, I didn’t get it to save locations for things for a while, because I had to bring stuff back to the cabin and leave it there over a daily reset before it stayed in its place, I believe. Also I didn’t realize that locked gates reset too, so I need to get out a key I thought I was done with and put away. :confused:

Only a few birds left on the list! I made some good progress for one day. Thanks for the tips.

1 Like