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:) thank you, really glad the atmosphere worked

thanks :)

aaa thank you so much, it's really nice knowing it's stuck with you!

the pin emoji on the little entries themselves will pin that text to the big board on the right! it seems to be working on my end but something may've gotten messed up in your instance? this stuff is so finnicky lol

I'm glad the color change was apparent, I was worried it'd be too subtle, but minmaxing like that is a good way of getting those more profound changes!

the seed actually can go to like idk a few thousand or so, idk why I locked it to like 10 in the auto generator, sometimes I just Do Things lol

looks like you've got an issue with your permissions in your browser, they're not letting twine set up the save state. see here: https://www.chromium.org/for-testers/bug-reporting-guidelines/uncaught-securityerror-failed-to-read-the-localstorage-property-from-window-access-is-denied-for-this-document

I assume this is cause you're using Brave, which seems pretty restrictive of functionality that Twine needs to operate. security is antithetical to the Deplotted Lands I guess.

so, wait, to be clear, did you download the html file? are you using, like, an itch program or something rather than just directly downloading it? that might cause problems...

It should just open in a browser... Is your system set up to launch html files in a browser? It's a Twine so it's basically a webpage...

Oh I gotcha! But no it's designed to be generative, so the ending is a reading specific to the cards you drew :D I'm glad you got to see them at least!

Thank you, I'm so glad you enjoyed it!

I saw! it looked like you missed going back to the crystal ball at the end to get the full description of what your cards meant though! hope you get a chance to see the full reading at some point. thanks for checking it out!

there's 22 cards (I think) in final build... if you poke through the source code by inspecting the game element, you can find a script tag with the RANDOMGEN id, and in the dict.card object you can see them all. Some of them are generative, so like The Moon card actually calls out to the {moongen] function and you can see how it's put together. for cards like that there's no "stable" description cause it can switch between a bunch of alternate moon states. a few other cards are like that--like The Armory pulls randomly from the [weapon] corpus three times for its description. but yeah that's where at least the skeleton of the different cards is set

I could post that code here but it might get a bit messy since it doesn't look like itchio has a way of posting code blocks...

Thank you, glad you found your way eventuall

Thanks!

Mostly I just couldn't figure out how I'd do pop up imagery within the system haha. Though I might be able to have a separate popup div display the cards... I'll have to give it some thought!

Thanks so much!

Thanks so much! Both for the comment and for putting the engine and jam together! I definitely feel very influenced by Borges and by, you know, all the people influenced by Borges.

Thanks!

Thank you for playing it!

Thanks so much! I was actually honestly worried that the architecture was TOO ornate and overly difficult to navigate so I'm glad it's breathtaking rather than suffocating, if that makes sense.

Incidentally I ended up making the game because I just got really interested in the question of how to represent staircases with such minimal graphics and such rigid movement constraints... so it's not surprising the architecture stands out. Everything kind of grew from the architecture outward.

Thanks so much!

Thank you!

No these are really interesting thoughts! And very similar to thoughts I've had myself about other mechanics.

Basically a lot of this design has been sort of trying furiously to swim against the whirlpool of typical game design, because like if you treat it like an RPG I think it gets pretty horribly frustrating? There's no way of grinding items, there's no kind of obvious predictable order to when certain things appear... and all that's intentional, but if any mechanic accidentally flips the behavioral switch in everyone's head now that says "I need to grind and hoard and grind some more because that's what you do in games" the whole house of cards kind of...

wait, I've mixed like three metaphors there, haven't I?

Whatever, the point is that like I tried aggressively to avoid gamifying this in the typical ways but part of that involves integrating in some of the useful design space that grindy games can offer while still finding ways to signal, as you suggest, that this is a kind of exception.

Actually, the jump to another screen might be the solution here, since it loops the tapestries in with the mask and the root, taking advantage of those existing mechanics...

I may give that a try! :D

Designing this game has been such an interesting case study in how hard it is to discourage RPG habits without totally hamstringing the design space. Like the tapestry fragments encourage something they're not really MEANT to but I also wouldn't want to lose what they do narratively so ????

You definitely don't have to collect 200 mosaic tiles to get the Super Secret Ending though, haha.

I may just add an autosave feature to a future patch, since so many people seem to be playing this for... well, much longer stretches than I really expected!

Holy crap that's a lot of items! How long have you been playing? o_o

I gotta make writs of passage a little less common... that frequency doesn't really fit the flavor.

Anyway it's not a viscerturgy book problem, turns out, though that was a pretty good guess. It's an "I stupidly forgot to add a line of code to the non-bug-test version of the slime cave card" problem. And yes I'm aware there's some irony in the fact that my bug testing efforts so far have CAUSED all the bugs in the final release version--story-breaking bugs no less. Still, it's kind of heartening to hear that you liked the game so much despite major storylines being unplayable!

I want to fix a few other minor problems before harassing everyone with another bug fix, but an update with a fully playable slime storyline should be out in the next few days. Thanks so much for letting me know this was broken!