I haven’t finished this one yet (since I’m not a time traveler ), but I thought it would be fun to share the results of the mad-lib from my second session, and others are welcome to do the same!
Once upon a time, there was a little okapi who lived in a big forest. But she was no ordinary okapi — she had 50 billion big toes! Because of that, the other animals in the forest called her Big toeie The Many-Big toed Okapi. Then, one day, a giant ugly pillow was threatening the forest, and she managed to prattle it with her many strong big toes…
Haha, nice! Thanks for sharing! @Allx and I had a lot of fun with the mad libs as we were testing the game (but we never got to such impressively large numbers!)
I’m very excited to see which stories players will experience over these coming weeks, and what they’ll think of them
When looking for games to play, I sort of jumped the gun when I started the first time and got into the puzzles and thus missed a useful piece of information about how and when you can continue at one point.
So I recommend people who went too fast, like me (I was window shopping for entries that seemed interesting, and this did) to either use the save slots or re-open the game in a private browser in case you feel you missed something. The information is there–I just kind of whooshed past it carelessly.
I really like the idea of having something that will pull me back to IFComp without forcing me. I have a daily task that pings the ballot page, but this feels less like a daily chore.
Anything that pings me to rate and play as many entries as I can is worthwhile & it’s neat to have an entry that may help bring more attention on the others, since we can’t solve it all at once This also feels a lot more relaxed than websites that track big long daily streaks, too. (I have about all of these I can handle right now!)
So yesterday I spent a while turning my computer’s time and date forward and played the “whole” thing only to find that… it keeps going. There are five sets of cryptic crossword clues, but the little daily puzzles/interactions? Each day of the week has a whole sequence of events: if you had started playing on September first and played it every day until the end of the comp (well, the 13th) it still wouldn’t repeat.
So if you want to use it as a daily advent calendar to draw you back to IFComp and keep you wondering who’s going to show up at the Apothecary today, you totally can: it’ll be there for as much or as little as you want to play…
Yeah, I was asking Ally, who said that the little boy and his mom (you read a book to him and it asks you to choose words before you see the story) only come on Mondays
As a side note, has anyone been having trouble inputting the answers to the cryptic crosswords? There are two that I’m very confident in my answers to, but they don’t seem to be working when I enter them. It could be to do with the fact that I’m on mobile, so if it’s working for everyone else I’ll just try on my laptop when I get home tomorrow.
The clues I have are:
Simply contains a small demon (3): my answer is imp
Spherical fruit says it can’t elope (10): my answer is cantaloupe
I’m like 99% sure they’re right but if they’re not then. You know. Ignore the question about the game being weird here.
Those are what I had too, and I was able to enter them successfully on mobile (Chrome on Android). Although I had trouble with the second one because I kept misspelling it…
Those are what I had as well. Maybe it’s a browser thing? I know Firefox started asking me if I wanted to block site popups after I kept putting in the wrong answers for one of them…
I just heard from a helpful player who also reported a bug with the cryptic text fields! It might have been the same one?
Nornally you should be able to type in lowercase and the field converts it to uppercase for you, and this seems to work fine for most (?) people. But sometimes the conversion doesn’t happen, which means the player has to make sure their answer is typed all in uppercase in order for it to be accepted. Mac/Safari might be an affected combo (maybe also iOS/Safari, if that’s what you were using?)
My partner and I are currently looking into it, and if we can’t roll out a fix very soon, I’ll at least add a disclaimer somewhere.
One thing I found just now: I left my tab open overnight in Firefox and then hit F5, and I wasn’t informed a new shift started. However, when I cut and pasted the address into a new tab, it worked. (Note: just to check, this didn’t happen at, say, 9:59:50 and then 10:00:01. I don’t know when the new shifts start, and if I do figure them out, it’d feel wrong to spoil them here.)
I didn’t try ctrl-F5. I can maybe report on that later.
This very strongly looks like something that isn’t Twine’s or the programmer’s responsibility to sort out, so just in case people try F5 and see nothing, I want to note what I almost missed.
I get this on my Mac in Safari. If I reload the page/tab it doesn’t indicate a new day. I ended up closing the tab and reopening the HTML file I’d downloaded.
I was also initially really puzzled by why I couldn’t move time on after the first day eg no link to click on. But did eventually figure it out!
That is probably using the core web kit in iOS Safari. iOS browsers aren’t allowed to be totally fresh browser implementations, but are largely reskins on top of iOS Safari.
I had the same problem in Safari on my Mac laptop and have been exchanging info with @Ally today. Firefox on my Mac worked. But that’s a totally different implementation. Not a reskin as in iOS.
I think (it’s kinda scary, so I saved and downloaded the save file first) but you can also use the Restart button in the left sidebar and it’ll remember your progress but reset to a new shift if appropriate…
Wow, I just looked it up and that is fascinating to learn about! I had no idea!
Ah, that’s a very clever find! Yeah, because the Sugarcube “Restart” feature normally doesn’t touch save files, it should in theory be safe to use for getting into a new shift, as it sends you back to the start passage where the game will automatically load the latest save and perform a new check on your date/time.
I think anything that takes you back to the start of the game should work, so closing the tab/window is a good way to do it. Knowing that some players have been waiting on the post-shift passage and getting stuck there, I’m considering adding a more obvious way to get back out! I mainly just want to avoid prematurely kicking out folks who are still trying to buy/chat/solve as the timeslot changes.
I think a more blatant hint about what to do - e.g. close the tab or browser, and reload in another time slot - would be helpful for folks like me! I was very stuck, having already chatted, solved all the puzzles so far, and not yet able (too few credits) to buy anything. And there was nothing else I could do. And I couldn’t understand initially why this was. I was about to email you about this the other day. Then figured it out
Hi everyone,
I’m Alex – Ally’s partner, playtester, and code monkey – and I confess I wrote most of the JS code in the game. So if something’s not working correctly, it is almost certainly my doing. Occasionally, it might be a bit flipping cosmic ray. But most of the time, it’s me.
So first, let me apologize for the issue with the Cryptic Clues only accepting uppercase answers. It’s supposed to be case-insensitive, and of course on my system everything works perfectly. So now I have (re)learned my lesson that I need to test on a variety of browsers & OS… Again, my humble apologies!
The good news is that we just rolled out a patch that I think should fix the issue for all OS/browser combinations. Next time you’re solving a cryptic, feel free to try lower/mixed case and let us know if it does/doesn’t work!
Thank you to everyone that brought this to our attention and provided the details we needed to help us replicate & patch it (), and a special thanks to Viv Dunstan for patiently putting up with and responding to all our questions!
), but I thought it would be fun to share the results of the mad-lib from my second session, and others are welcome to do the same!
), and a special thanks to Viv Dunstan for patiently putting up with and responding to all our questions!