After an enjoyable Christmas holiday spent working my way through all the IF Comp online transcripts of folks playing my game, as well as looking over reviews and other feedback, I’ve updated it with 200-odd bug fixes, usability updates, puzzle tweaks, and Easter eggs. There’s nothing really new to merit a replay (besides a couple of incidental jokes which you can access immediately via a just-implemented RUIN THE NEW JOKES command), but if you haven’t gotten around to it yet, this version should be a smoother experience. You can grab it on the IFDB page.
Having around 50 substantive transcripts to review, and see exactly how folks play, is incredibly helpful but also incredibly humbling as I saw how stuff I thought I’d implemented or clues I thought were obvious failed to come through. The most surprising takeaway, though is that about 95% of people tried to undress the PC within their first half-dozen moves. Is this normal? I guess my game is set at a party and has a rather laddish atmosphere, but it still surprised me! A couple of players also typed in asides or jokes of their own while playing, which was super helpful for seeing how the game was landing for these folks, and also just delightful on its own. I’ll need to do this myself next year!
Here are some of the bigger tweaks:
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I made changes to two puzzles, one to make it easier (once you feed or show food to the pig he’ll now consider following you any time you leave his location) and one to make it harder (examining now advances time in the finale, which I think should help with the pacing as discussed in my post-mortem)
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I fixed a bug that made it harder to reach the “best” ending without hints (the last step to successfully hide an unmentionable on the writing desk is to remove the stylus, but the ending text didn’t show the magistrate finding it if you neglected that part) and added a small extra hint nudging towards what’s probably the hardest hiding place to figure out.
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You can now DANCE not just with yourself, but also with other characters (or at least you can try).
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The rope, water fountain, and the player character’s body parts should be a bit better-behaved and easier to interact with.
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There’s one obscure bug in the finale that I’ve not been able to fully reproduce and may still be lurking about, so if anyone comes across it and can drop me a line, I’d be grateful: sometimes it appears that taking back a previously-hidden unmentionable from a particular location might actually retrieve a different one – like, you’ve put an unmentionable on the desk and given one to Alky, but when you type TAKE UNMENTIONABLE FROM DESK the one that’s actually moved to you is Alky’s.
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OK, if you’ve read this far here’s a set of gags from the initial release that I think are pretty fun but as far as I can tell nobody’s caught as of yet: you can re-examine, and once again try to eat, each individual food item on the banquet table after the pig’s ruined everything.