I’ve gotten a lot of email feedback on two bugs that I felt I would relay to the community in the interest of saving everyone some time. Both involve naming agents, specifically, the white and green agents.
The first isn’t really a bug, but it mislead so many people I thought I would alert the general community to the fact that The white agent’s name doesn’t actually change her behavior. She is ALWAYS going to be your enemy. She hates you. You really are a terrible person, aren’t you?
The second is, unfortunately, a bug. The band, in the nightclub, has the wrong first name for the green agent. They think her name is Vivian. Her name is actually Andrea.
thanks to the players for pointing this out.
Herr.M above is the first person to beat this game. In fact, he beat all my playtesters…impressive work.
There are still four slots open to be forever memorialized on my website.
Thanks for all the feedback by the way. I plan to re-release this game after the contest with a more robust parser, so any nitpicky problems with commands that really ought to work is appreciated.
First off, thank you everyone who played, especially people who wrote me with feedback (or wrote reviews with feedback). While I am an avid player of interactive fiction, and I have made IF works before, this was my first time in any sort of contest, and the first time I tried to make a game for anything more than a small circle of friends. This is, truthfully, a game I thought of more than a decade ago, which took me a very long time to get around to writing. It matters a great deal to me, and I hope that shows.
All in all, I am very happy with what I created here, and most of the reviews suggest I captured the story I set out to tell: A weird and uncomfortable quest toward what feels like certain doom. Three people, that I know of, were able to unravel the mystery. What they found is their secret to tell, or not.
Based on the reviews, there are two things I need to do better:
employ a vastly better parser
do a much better job describing and selling the game
I plan to use the feedback I received to improve the game over the next month, and release an update. The parser will still probably be far “stingier” than most games, but this will hopefully cut down on the maddening “guess the verb” issues.
I’m already well underway with my submission for next year’s IFCOMP, which will be choice based and (mostly) happy, rather than parser-based and full of nightmarish despair. I’m looking forward to seeing all of you again then.
I’ll post a link to the new versions of the game when it appears.
Well, at the risk of repeating myself: I think this shows. Maybe your game is slightly rough around the edges, which is what might have scared off a lot of people (besides the Windows only client and maybe to a lesser degree the description), but once you look behind the veil there is quite an exceptional view.
This was one of my favorite games in the competition, as well as the one I spent the most time playing. Yes, it is “rough around the edges.” But it does such a wonderful job of holding out the temptation of “Let me play just one more time and try this idea” - again and again, as you slowly uncover layer after layer of what’s really going on. Very fun.