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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This is cool! Do you have any way to contact nune? It seems likely they’d appreciate a heads-up on their game not being finishable.
Edit:
Oh, that’s interesting. Of note is that some of the games are hosted offsite, on, like, itch.io - if you’re trying to watch updates you’d have to watch that, too. I’ve updated mine at least once to fix a bug, I’m sure others have as well.
re: itch.io going down - I’d generally agree but I can’t really distribute my game in a non-hosted way, since it does involve CORS (a browser security policy which basically prevents people from running the game directly from their computer), and I’m not super inclined to self-host as well as put it on itch.io, the payoff/effort on that seems really low.
If anybody’s interested in talking about the Spring Thing entries, the Unnamed IF Book Club’s subject for the next meeting is Spring Thing entries. It’s be Wednesday, April 27, 5pm Pacific - PM me if you want an invite.
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Yes, that’s interesting and good to have more assurance we’re less alone than we think, if we are updating. Bbut yes, it might mean that there’s one more place to look at. In your case it would be hard to send in an updated Dropbox file to Aaron.
I know some of the files hosted on itch have been updated on springthing and itch.io.
Itch.io–well, I like having it, if only because it’s fun/easy to write update notes and I like the “create a private game page” feature. (Still haven’t made TRT public there myself.)
I feel more weighted towards puzzle-centered games, so that’s very cool to know the “I wish I had time, but I’m glad people fill in the gaps for me” works both ways.
And this isn’t exactly reviews of works vs. works, but I think something I found recently echoes Rovarsson’s point: a couple YouTube channels on obscure/odd happenings in the National Football League (pro US football) have gone way beyond “team x won, team x lost.”
The people who’ve take time to sort through stuff like this have thus added a lot. I’ve wound up very interested in some teams I disliked as a kid. (Note: the analogy doesn’t extend to dislike for others’ Spring Thing submissions. Just more, I get to have positive experiences about something I might have passed on otherwise.)
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I think neocities.org is probably the best alternative to hosting on itch.io, due to its similar ease of use.
I don’t know how to contact nune, besides maybe leaving a comment on one of their itch.io games?
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itch.io does by default send email notifcations when people comment on your game, so that probably would work.
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https://borogove.io/ is designed for simple IF uploading. I’ve been using it a lot recently, it’s like itch without any of the clutter.
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As an author, I’ve stayed away from doing proper reviewing, but I’d like to say that I’ve been enjoying The Hole Man, Let’s Talk Alex, Orbital Decay, and You, Me and Coffee in particular, and I’m now partway through New Year’s Eve 2019. I’ve been spending more time on link-based narratives as puzzle-based games take longer, but I’m currently enjoying trying to crack Wry and Tours Roust Torus!
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Manifest No is magnificent. It will take me forever to read it all, because I’m reading it like I read Cormac McCarthy (with a dictionary at hand) and like I read Marlon James (veerryy slowly to extract every poetic word).
And since I’m reading James’s Moon Witch, Spider King at the same time, I’m just steeped in poetic language and feverish imagery. It’s glorious.
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I played Sweetpea yesterday. There’s some great writing in there, and vivid imagery. I played just before bed and it kept me awake for a while, processing it all (I haven’t read the postmortem, yet). Very good. The main problem I encountered was with the colour of the inline clickable text, which is pale pink (I think) amongst white, and almost indiscernible to my eyes. But that’s a minor quibble and, I expect, easily fixed.
Definitely work a look.
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Thank you for playing and sharing your thoughts! I’m happy to hear that the writing and imagery landed well- I’m a poet and a writer far before considering myself a coder (Sweetpea was my first attempt at making a finished Twine in a self contained work!) Haha, sorry to have kept you up- I hope you got some good sleep in the end! The feedback on the pale pink (you got it!) text is also very helpful. I’ll have to keep in mind stronger contrast for future experiments. Cheers. 
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