Hey thanks 
The art was done by my partner – https://twitter.com/mathandyr for his twitter, which has some screenshots of a pretty awesome-looking game he’s working on. I was very worried about people not clicking on the interconnectedness so I might have overcompensated with some of the connections and the whole flashing lights reading THIS IS A PUZZLE at some points, but considering the 100+ games I was glad I did.
Obviously, as soon as I started on the concept I had to make peace with the ieda that some people wouldn’t get it – a few people, based on the feedback I got, had the exact scenario I figured, which was “I played the game and bashed up against an unwinnable puzzle and so I looked at the source and now I’m even more confused”, and, like, I run the risk of diminishing it but this is the part of the game that is the Hilarious Practical Joke that I set up, and I can only beg everyone’s forgiveness and tell you I meant it in gentle good humor. But I was very nervous because I really hoped at least somebody would get it. I think you were the second or third to solve it, so I can probably credit you with me finally being able to breathe again
But yeah – I wanted to create a puzzle where, if you don’t have all the parts or recognize that they’re connected to each other, it’s incomprehensible, the player is left confused, wondering if someone’s playing a joke on them or if something is poorly or improperly implemented or if there was some Artistic Statement behind it all – there’s certainly something that you could sputter out about fascism and unsolvable puzzles or something – but none of that really works, and it doesn’t add up. But when you realize they’re just three different incarnations of the same story, it becomes super obvious – after you make that leap, the game explicitly tells you where to cut, glue, and fold, and before you know it you have a lovely 3D papercraft model of The Knot to display at your desk.
Overall I feel really happy with the execution – I wrote it using a lot of graphs and charts and it’s structured with a lot of symmetries, so it was kind of wonderful in that once I figured out some of the anchoring points, whenever I came up with an element, its reflection in the other two parts would reveal itself. Even editing was easy – I jumped between them pushing things down and at some point there was an audible click and I realized I was done. The big thing I wasn’t implement is that I have a soundtrack written which weaves everything together – the three parts each have their own set of instrumentation, with a few leitmotifs in common, and in the ending – when reality blurs and God finally figures out that the most effective way to deal with the Nazis without becoming a Nazi is with a Ponsonby Britt-style bomb – all of that gets woven together in with the text (giving a little extra kick to the timed text, which I know is divisive and I don’t care because I like it so I kept it in anyway, for reasons I trace to a half-understood lecture my favorite professor once gave on Helene Cixoux’s “The Laugh of the Medusa” and Julia Kristeva’s idiosyncratic use of the term “semiotic”) into something that sounds really noisy and pretty and cool. And Twine is kind of awful with sound, particularly when you’re syncing it with tightly-timed text, and my browser was also giving me all of these weird hiccups relating to browser permission of autoplayed media, so I had to kill that darling. It’s something I’ll probably restore for the rerelease.
Anyway, I guess this counts as my postmortem, so thanks for that too – now I can check something off my to-do list and go to bed with a clear conscience! Thanks for playing and hey, thanks to everyone in this thread for – I think the best way I can phrase it is “noticing this weird thing I made and caring enough about the metadata to make sure it’s categorized properly” – anyway it is all appreciated!