In this episode, Jenni and I play The Curse of the Scarab by @nilsf.
I thought I heard Jenni say a cuss word while we were recording. I didn’t notice it again in editing, so I didn’t set the Explicit flag on the episode. But if you happen to hear it, please tell me the timestamp, so I can go in and buzz it out. For your whistleblowing you will get a special prize, which is, I will click the little heart icon under your post
Couldn’t hear any cuss word so no price for me (but could it be a marketing effort from your side, though?)
As a consolation prize, I have clicked your little heart. I know it’s not the same as having it clicked by Ryan, but I can’t aspire to be him. Well, I can. But it’s futile.
Thank you so much for checking! But this reminds me—I’m very concerned that there might be a cuss word somewhere in my upcoming IFComp entry, THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL 4: CROWN OF PEARLS.
I’ll assume that we can use this thread to discuss the episode?
Ryan’s Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder and Mike Spivey’s Sugarlawn are the two big ones that I know of. From the IFDB optimization puzzle tag, it looks like maybe Museum Heist is too? The Prongleman Job is a very different beast.
Yeah, I gathered that the former was the inspiration for the term (there’s also a Clash of the Type-Ins episode about it), but apparently there’s a whole genre to explore! Well, at least three games.
But it made me realize that there might be other genres, or various -likes, that I don’t know about.
So I did listen to the episode after all. Yikes. I was expecting to dislike listening to my voice simply because of the pitch. The weird accent I apparently have came as an unwelcome shock. I hope next time you have somebody more euphonious on.
I think Into The Sun - Details (which was missing the optimisation puzzle tag) also qualifies as a verdeterrelike.
I call it RIFF (RIFF Interactive Fiction Framework), it’s a jumble of javascript I’ve been using in pretty much all my games. I use it for my own enjoyment though. I might clean it up and release it someday but I feel no urgency to inflict yet another half-baked authoring system upon the community. I doubt it does anything Inform + Vorple can’t do better.
You have a perfectly nice voice and accent! It is a routine shock for people to hear their own recorded voice played back to them if they aren’t used to it - there are studies that the acoustics of how you hear your voice inside your own skull is naturally quite different than how it actually sounds externally.
Jenni and Ryan both have extensive experience recording podcasts and Let’s Plays so it takes a bit of time to develop the “radio voice” and improv skills to fill conversation gaps and sound comfortable speaking off the cuff. You have nothing to be self-conscious about! Plus it sounds like they didn’t pre-brief you about how the episode works!
I’ve done theater and voice over work, but when I was asked to read and play Fair for an IF meetup in a group call I was initially panicky and definitely rehearsed reading the game beforehand so there would be no surprises (I hadn’t looked at it in years) and even recorded and listened to myself a bit so I could re-learn “relax and speak from your diaphragm instead of through your nose while public speaking” back into muscle memory.
There is another new episode—our landmark fiftieth episode!—in which Jenni and Nils play the game The Little Match Girl 2: Annus Evertens, which it turns out is not an ideal length for a Clash of the Type-Ins episode, whoops.
There are a couple of dumb little things I’d like to point out to listeners after you’re done listening, but this is not a marketing effort from my side, it’s just something barely interesting but kind of spoilery:
When I said I was “hmm-hmm-hmm years old” at the beginning, that was not an intentional call-forward to Lily Cassidy’s journal; that was just me lazily reusing a joke I didn’t know I had used in the game. When I kept saying “we don’t have all the time in the world,” that was not an intentional call-forward to the villain speech at the end—it’s just a weird, eerie coincidence.
I think Ryan and Jenni made a lot of progress in Curse in the podcast, considering the nature of the game.
-Wade