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I'm going through entries in the Short Games Showcase, and I played through this, and I'm glad I did! I've played a lot of Groundhog Day style entries where you control one person, but I don't remember many with two.

I like that there aren't *too* many choices to feel overwhelmed, and I like how you can "pass" to figure what the defaults are.

I'm amused at why I missed out the first few times, but I can't get spoiler tags to work so I don't want to spell it out.

I wondered about the significance of the stop names too. I googled and saw Lorem Ipsum and translated it, and it's cool to read more here in the comments. I'm glad I was exposed to this via the Short Games Jam!

Pickles looks like my old cat Simba, except he had a black nose.

I also made the mistake of rubbing his belly once before googling "do cats like their bellies rubbed." Oops.

Hey, somehow I missed this comment, but I'm really glad I saw it now. Thanks so much!

It was a nice boost to help me re-release the game with stuff that couldn't fit in the 4-hour window. I had a lot of fun making it and touching it up.

Excellent! Starting early should be a huge boon.

(See above for the answer.)

I had fun, but I just don't have any ideas to make a tutorial fresh. Otherwise, I would. Learning Adventuron was rewarding, but I've found myself looking at other projects recently. I don't want to spend time feeling bad about not entering.

Plus I remember how writing my entry got in the way of testing for you.  Not that your entry needed it, but ... I was disappointed I didn't make the time to.

I figured I should decide where my efforts will go, and they'll be to reviewing and testing.

(Also, I have a longer form Adventuron game planned for ParserComp, which I didn't enter last year. So I want to return to that and maybe later to TALJ.)

What the title says. I've always enjoyed playing through the entries & last year I wrote my first Adventuron game, which I always wanted to. It's a neat jam/comp to be a part of. And maybe I can help those folks who didn't make it in time last year or who need last minute testing this year.

blurglecruncheon@gmail.com. (Mods, if you'd rather we not display email addresses, I can change this.)

Ugh, thanks so much! And sorry for the inconvenience. This is something I thought I checked, but I was in a rush to get a post comp release out & didn't even check what was up. Should be fixed now. I checked the other 2 EctoComp games too.

(Also, this pointed out a weakness in my copy-over scripts. They copied a file to index.html and download.html. If I'd named the file, say, download-csda instead of download, it would've been immediately obvious. So this will make release 3 that much easier to release with less worry this will happen again!)

Well done. This reminded me of an incident of far less magnitude which I won't detail so as not to spoil things. But it helped provide closure to something uncomfortable, so I appreciate that very much.

Thanks for your comments! Yeah, it's a bit frustrating, I originally thought "oh it's straightforward" then I realized there were alternate pronunciations based on dialect but by then I had too much of a game to junk it.

I had lots of fun with this. Let me be another player to say, well done. Mighty Owl is a funny NPC.

Thanks! I think one thing that really helped was, I copied a *lot* of code from this one to the bigger ones. So that was a help. As was being able to auto-generate it and use speech to text.

Good job with your entry, too. I had planned to go back and look at the good IFComp entries I missed, and working through it definitely motivated it to get back around to your IFComp entries.

Thanks for your kind words! I was looking to make something that was simpler than the Inform stuff I wrote, because I realize it can get tangled, so it' good to know it was a move in the right direction. I had a lot of fun writingI wanted people to just have fun working through it too

Thanks, it was a runoff from my IFComp entry. I wanted it to just be fun. Comments like yours have been a nice boost to fix up the post-comp version.

Thanks! I was looking for a way to keep things simple so people wouldn't be bogged down as they are with my Inform games. I was going for a "fun" angle here.

And yes, I was especially pleased with the zoo. It was actually quite fun to google image search and draw MSPaint pictures based on them. (small voice: yes, also, I was too lazy to draw a Giraffe head. It was tricky at that resolution.)

Hope you find time to get through all the games. I hope to get through at least half.

Yeah, it was a close thing ... I did have to punt a few features to post-comp! It helped I was able to generate a lot of the similar code with a python script.

(And, of course, I double-checked that graphics didn't count against the time limit.)

Wonderful! I appreciate the quick response, too ... helped me fix a few other things so I can get the post-comp release out quickly.

Thanks! No problem there. I just put a note on the front page. If you'd rather I not, I can delete it.

Thanks! That helps me sort out the endings I got.

I'd assumed witch/zombie/ghost were 0/1/2 right.

I always enjoy a cute bitsy game!

Okay, we quickly see the cuteness is only in the graphics, and I enjoyed the subversion of the book very much. Poor munchkins!

The player can still solve the game if it is unfixed. However, it looks really bad. It's a quick fix -- I twiddled a boolean state wrong.

Is updating acceptable (it's not game-breaking, only graphics-breaking), or should I just put in a note "Don't (command that causes the bug)" on the front page?

Thanks! I was able to copy over a lot of repetitive code & also generate a lot too with a script from an earlier Adventuron game & speech-to-text saved a lot of time too. (It also helped that I had the idea in July, so I never felt rushed & I could plan out how to produce code.)

Adventuron's coding is also simple by design ... I'd be interested in what you could do with it if you had a fun small project. Adding graphics is especially easy.

Oh no! I forgot to mention HINT helps with the first puzzle. After that, it helps with the X ME hint-item.

Until then, you can try X ME to find a hint item that will tell you something about the right phrase. The game title is a clue.

Fun clever use of adjectives in Adventuron!

(small voice) I'm still figuring out the last one, though, I think. I've gotten a ghost, witch and vampire to appear and assume that's a clue as to which clothes I got right.

Very fun. Congratulations on making a maze enjoyable!

I didn't have the heart to be a brat the first time through. I visited all the houses.

I've definitely used EctoComp as an excuse to write more than one thing & I don't think I'm the only person! I've found the entries I started first generally tended to be significantly higher quality than my second ones, especially if I got the first ones done very early. So this is a poke to try and do something every day to have more than one entry.

Thanks so much! It's cool to get a note on something I wrote a while back, just for its own sake and for motivation to get (back) to work on my next project.

Great to see you updating things! Hope your other projects are going well--the BDB project looks formidable and worthwhile!

Haha. Ouch. I intended it to be bad, but I didn't expect anyone outside the immediate community to look into it.

I don't know if you're on intfiction.org or aware of ParserComp? But if you're not aware of ParserComp, they can use all the votes they can get. I didn't enter this year, but I'm voting in it. I've already played a few legitimately good games, and maybe you'll find one you enjoy, too. I hope so -- you've earned it after YTDND!

https://itch.io/jam/parsercomp-2025/entries

Thanks ... hope you didn't spend too long on it.

BTW, reading your comments, I was led to a recreation of Jon Bois's Myst/Barry Bonds mockup. I didn't know it existed so I was glad to play through it.

It might be better that way. I meant this game to be really, really bad for the bad game jam. Then I felt guilty publishing it. TEST ALL with the ulx file is probably a better option, to see how and why it is bad without wasting too much time.

I guess one of the points of it being so hard was, you needed mind-reading to do it, so it's in the walkthrough.

The idea is that you need to examine the bed, the fridge and the couch 6 times, but you need to do them in A-B-C, A-C-B, B-C-A, B-A-C and C-A-B and C-B-A order.

Now it's out of my system I'd like to go back to writing stuff that might actually be good.

This was really fun as a meta-exercise. I had a feeling it was going to be about something I didn't know, and I was right, so after having fun barreling around fruitlessly a bit, I found the reasoning in the solution was fun to read.

The exits are also much more interesting than the standard S/E/N/W/NW of a parser game!

There's a high likelihood I won't be entering this year (never say never! I joined just in case) but still wanted to offer testing services.

Sorry for letting this slip!

PRUNE PRIDE should work. If it doesn't, let me know, and if you have a transcript, even better.

Sorry for the inconvenience here. I think I rushed production on BBGG. But I appreciate the motivation to get that post comp release out.

There's a phrase that rhymes with SPOON SPIED and GOON GUIDE.

Perhaps "clear mind" isn't the right phrase here. "right mindset" is more like it. I can spoil if you want.

Thanks for looking back to play BBGG, and for the reminder that I want to push out another release--there are still things floating around to fix in it!

I may do another run through later. I found stuff here and there that did not affect my enjoyment. I didn't take detailed notes, but there was one line with "her" where it should have been "here." So maybe search your source for the full word her. (Or her. or space/her/space.) But that was it -- likely not worth an update.

If you open up the source after the comp, I'd be glad to help and poke some more.

Yeah, I think I may've had a bit of a brain fade since I'd already used the slot to get the machine started and then open up Syria. I wound up playing during several different sessions and I thought "Okay, the game is being nice and having you use everything once." Or maybe I was thinking more on the lines of "put USB port A in slot B." I guess I never considered the slot could be like a mail slot.

So after I took a break, came back and got the Damascus Steel, I went through the process of elimination of what still needed use, and I crossed the slot off. Leaving me with ... nothing! Oops.

Thanks! I'm always flattered when people whose first language is not English give my stuff a try.

I figured people had enough words to guess without having to figure verbs for the objects too. Though I have enjoyed the entries in this jam (yours included) that have you use a variety of (well clued) verbs to get through.

Very belated thanks for the clarification here!

And thanks for extending the deadline. However, I'm not sure if I should use the extra time to test what I have. I mean, that might make it less bad in the wrong sort of way.

Thanks, got through the game and enjoyed it! For whatever reason I didn't think I could put more than 1 item in the slot.