Oh my gosh. I love this. It’s making me doubt that I understand English at times, and then I’m like what? I’m enjoying poetry??
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It’s kind of alarming to take in all at once, but focus on any individual sentence and it blooms with meaning and beauty (or bleakness). It’s really wonderful.
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The last thing I did was the two-letter response to Noon? No! No!. Now I’m “already in the process of going on.” and can’t move anywhere else.
Edited: never mind, think I have it.
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I played this and enjoyed it - as far as it went. The story seems to stop a bit abruptly with this line: Wherever they’re from, I know where they’re going. I’m not sure if this is actually the end or if I’m just being thick and another branch would yield more (although I’ve looked and I can’t find another way through)? NB this isn’t so much the fault of the author as my own lack of subtlety in requiring a big fat THE END at the conclusion of a story, before I can comfortably move on.
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I passed the link for Manifest No to one of my author friends who has never been able to get into IF, but she’s also a huge poetry author and fan and I thought she’d dig this. She responded “Wow. What incredible use of language!”
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That’s where I was stopped too. Looking at the squiffy code, I think the game has a bug here; there should be a link in this node at “the bushes”. This section is well before the halfway point of the story. Here’s a fixed version (I just changed a line in story.js).
externoon_fixed.zip (77.9 KB)
There might be other errors, idk.
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Thanks very much! I’ll carry on with it then.
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–pinkunz wandering aimlessly around on a sunny day, whistling while lost in thought when suddenly…– boom! crash!– “Who left that lying around here!? …oooh, this looks interesting…” —pinkunz continues on his way, nose scraped and bleeding but happy to have found new purpose in life–
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Like browsing in a bookshop, I like to read the first paragraph of something before I commit. To see if those first few sentences still tingle in my brain a few hours/days later.
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Thanks for this fix!
Unfortunately there is at least one more game-breaker, a broken link to the “Edward.” passage. I took the path of least resistance: opening externoon.squiffy in a text editor and just reading the story that way.
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Wow. I just went through the code and found a couple more broken links. This new version should be fixed; the last lines of the game are Dear Angie, I’ll be back tomorrow.
externoon_fixed.zip (77.9 KB)
In totally unrelated news, itch.io seems to have been sporadically broken today, which really reaffirms the need to have multiple hosting/playing options…
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Thanks so much for fixing, again! I haven’t been back to the game yet, since my original dead end (just as well, by the sound of it) but I will do. It’s a pity, really, that the original seems multiply broken as the game itself is a good bit of writing - sufficiently so for me to want to go back and finish it.
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I’ve kind of been away, but I’d like to thank everyone for the discussion on Tours Roust Torus. It inspired a few changes–including one where you were locked out of a winning ending due to a well-intentioned help feature (TLDR: “continue the action” and “next” do, in fact, behave very differently) and another where the game actually spoils what to do to get to the center.
The second update for TRT should be available today (April 14th.)
I’d also like to add a small bug/workaround I found in an entry I enjoyed: for The Big Blue Ball,
I was locked out of the best ending on my first playthrough, but when I restarted and played through more quickly, I got the winning ending. This feels like a one-liner bug, perhaps with scenes starting or ending at the wrong time, and the game basing its state on if a scene was ongoing rather than if you had a specific item, so I can definitely relate! (How you know you’re locked out: you enter your house and everyone is still sleeping.)
This brings up a question: I’ve been tracking the updates on https://www.springthing.net/2022/stories/_ST2022readme.txt. Here is what we have so far. Do we need/want someone at the point maybe checking this file changing daily and adding to this topic, or to a side one? It wouldn’t be hard for me to just run a script to pull the URL contents, and if something changed from the last time, I could send myself an alert.
Here are the changes so far: 12 for 11 games
Apr 5: “Digit” fixed a typo.
Apr 5: “Super Mega Tournament Arc!” fixed an issue with offline fonts.
Apr 5: “The Prairie House” v1.1.0, various bug fixes.
Apr 7: “Wry” was updated to fix an early game-breaking bug.
Apr 7: “Phenomenoa” was updated with some minor tweaks to wording.
Apr 10: “Half-Alive” was updated.
Apr 10: “Lady Thalia and the Rose of Rocroi” was updated to fix a typo.
Apr 10: “Tours Roust Torus” fixed typos and a help-code bug that blocked players from winning.
Apr 11: “The Box” was updated with a few fixes and improvements.
Apr 11: “Manifest No” was updated with various fixes.
Apr 13: “Lady Thalia and the Rose of Rocroi” fixed a game-breaking bug.
Apr 13: “Custard & Mustard’s Big Adventure” was updated to version 1.0.1.
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Shout-out to @ChristopherMerriner for giving us a heads up about this one, btw! And to @rovarsson for keeping us posted about some other minor bugs. Fingers crossed we won’t have to push any more updates 
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I have to admit I felt awkward about sending Aaron a 2nd update & delayed a couple days. Seeing someone sending theirs in first made me feel much more okay!
Hopefully it will help others, too, for their first or second update or whatever.
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I’m glad that that helped you! I also feel better knowing that we aren’t the only ones who’ve sent in two updates. I was pretty embarrassed to realize that we’d released the game with a significant bug, but it’s good to remember that that’s not uncommon.
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Yeah…on my end I did a lot of “well that can’t break that’s too simple” or “I did check that, right?” rationalizing. I have a lot of tests to make sure that the way through works, and if I’m not careful that gives the illusion more is fixed than I thought.
It can be tough to take that step back and find new ways to make sure you’re testing certain things. Because the fear with testing simple things is that you’re wasting time and patting yourself on the back and missing the tricky bugs. But of course there is simple stuff you have to get right!
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What happened to us was basically that a certain segment of the game didn’t work if the value of a certain variable was too high, and since it was more likely to be higher than lower, we spent a lot of time fixing that and making sure it worked. In the process, we accidentally made it so that it didn’t work if the value was too low, but we didn’t think to go back and check that case. And given that it was the less likely one when playing normally, it took a bit before anyone noticed.
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I think my favourite part of SpringThing so far has been excitedly devouring all of the review threads people have popped up on here- it’s how I found out about the competition in the first place, as I stumbled across Emily Short’s blog from being an avid Fallen London player and devoured reviews on games and her theory/advice posts- especially for games I know I’m not likely going to play myself (whether the concept sounds too hard or puzzle heavy for me to get into, or the genre isn’t really up my alley- I don’t generally play comedic or high fantasy sorts of games for example.)
I think it’s really fun to see what someone else’s perspective is, especially if they’re a huge fan of the game for reasons that would never have occurred to me in the first place. Since I’m not really reading reviews to see if I want to play a game or not, and more so to see what the reviewer thinks since that’s the fun bit of a review for me- I also really like the differences people bring to the table in terms of their own life anecdotes or references to books or other movies or games they’ve engaged with. So cool! It’s awesome to feel like I have a sort of secondhand way to enjoy a work I otherwise likely wouldn’t know anything about.
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I find myself consuming movie and game reviews on YouTube for much the same reason. I never cared for print reviews in newspapers; I feel their obligatory nature and word count tends to make them regurgitated and tired. Whereas a YouTuber is a hobbyist and an enthusiast at heart, and might spend 40+ minutes gushing about a single episode from a television series that ended in the 1970s. I’d say at least half of the reviews I consume are for content I’ll never see or play.
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