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I enjoyed the game and played through to the end scenes. Nice sense of mystery in the beginning with weirdness at the end. Overall, I felt like I was progressing through a Lovecraft story in the beginning and the ending reminded me of Richard Corben’s Den.

Some specifics

• I liked the map
• I would like to be able to type just “north” instead of having to type “go north”
• I didn’t like being restricted to being able to have only 4 items in my inventory
• The descriptions are well written and comprehensive but I think they could be rewritten to tighten them up and make them  more concise.
• More proofreading is needed since there were numerous spelling errors (“charcture”, “writen”, “trys” instead of “tries”, “pannles” instead of “panels”, “anong”, “ables and equipment”, “soutwest”). James is also not capitalized in several places.
• I didn’t get a letter ending (A, B, C,...) after going through the disk, just Resume/Restart. Also, when I die it says “You are die”
• I didn’t care for the font
• I found the rain/lightning animation behind the scenes distracting. But maybe if you added sound effects?
• I would have liked a save feature
• I didn’t really care about the RPG elements, i.e. Not Doing Great, and I avoided all battles where I could
• I think Available Actions is sort of nice but I thought clicking on them would do more than just display text
• The initial interaction with sculpture is a bit kludgy but I did like the visual representations of the buttons

Hawkbyte -

Thank you for taking the time to play and review "The Time Machine."

I'd be interested in hearing more about what tricks "feel like part of the world and make the game deeper," which "feel artificial and frustrating," and which you feel are "red herrings." This is my first game and I'm trying to learn. Please feel free to email me about this topic at bill.maya@gmail.com instead of posting here (I don't want to spoil the game for anyone who hasn't played it yet).

I am working at making Wells' house less "ordinary" since he is supposed to be an inventor of somewhat eclectic pursuits (the orrery was a start and I have other devices planned). I chose the house because, quite simply, I had to start it somewhere and I felt dropping the player directly into the world of 802,701 would be too jarring and confusing.

I did have two rounds of beta testers and multiple beta testers in each round (7 in round 1; 5 in round 2). The games is as good as it is because of their efforts. Forgetting to mention them in some sort of game credits was an unfortunate omission, one that I will rectify in the next release (I did thank them personally and in my beta post on the IF forum, but not by name since I didn't want to break their anonymity without permission).

Putting the watch on the desk and not being able to take it again. My fault, caused by a last minute change that I didn't adequately test. Having Mrs. Watchett suggest you put the watch on the desk was unintentional, not me trying to be cruel.

I've removed the fuse-burning-out logic. I had reasons in there for putting it in initially, mainly to get the game to its end state, but now I realize that it would be better for the game to remove this constraint (but I may reintroduce it since, as you wrote, coming up with a substitute fuse might be an interesting puzzle).

I worked and reworked the controls in the time machine several times and I'm not 100% satisfied with the result that appears in the game. I had to let the player travel forward to 802,701 but I couldn't give them free reign to wander through the eons. I will have to rework this to make things clearer.

I plan on publishing a post-ParserComp version soon after the contest ends and I've added your list of unimplemented objects and actions to my To Do list. I've already fixed the typos you mentioned thought I couldn't find 'The entrace' and 'Wells" story' (I will keep searching for those two).

Thank you again for your kind words.

Bill