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[Taskmaster]

Thank you for starting to playing it so quickly. I have played the thing so many times while coding it that I am almost sick of it. Due to the nature of the game I have played the beginning much more than the ending, so most likely bugs will be more toward the later part of the game.

Did the room description text look blurry to you with the light gray shadow? It looks fine on some machines I've tried, but blurry on others, especially older monitors.

The parser can handle the two commands, but it can also handle more complicated sentences, which is one of the things I improved from my original mainframe version. For example, you can "Get note and read it" and the game should understand that.

Anyway, have fun. I have tried to spell check everything, but there may still be typos.

[Reup]

Look pretty good to me! To bad my taxi drove away Oh, and I got killed allready as well :P

Anyway, here's my log.

[A. J. Raffles]

Taxi? What taxi?:P
I'm afraid I failed rather miserably as well, because I mixed up west and east. Oh well.

By the way, there's a grammatical error in the intro: "a heretofore undiscovered tribe - upon which a team of explorers stumbled onto". "a heretofore undiscovered tribe which a team of explorers stumbled upon" would probably be better.

[Sebatianos]

Originally posted by Taskmaster@Nov 24 2005, 03:59 AM
Did the room description text look blurry to you with the light gray shadow? It looks fine on some machines I've tried, but blurry on others, especially older monitors.

The text was perfectly clear.
Well, I have a flatscreen with a 12ms responce time, so I guess that would rule out the old monitor :angel:

I'll play some more and let you know (I'll also try to explore all the options - haven't even begun on that one). Are there any funny responces for crazy random offensive commands (I remember Sherlock Holmes Another Bow had some great ones).

[A. J. Raffles]

Well, my laptop is five years old (so I assume the screen would be as well), but everything looked fine to me.

[Taskmaster]

Thanks again to everyone for playing and the tips. I made some changes to the screen to improve some things. I also changed the game so that if the taxi leave, the game ends as there is no way to get another taxi.

I will have to package the changes and put them on the site at some point. If you type something and get no response, such as Shoot Gun, let me know I thought I had SHOOT coded, but apparently not.

[A. J. Raffles]

Hmm, I know it sounds pathetic, but I'm stuck already. Just what am I supposed to do with that beehive?

Edit: Never mind, I figured it out. Whee!
Edit2: Stuck again. Oh well.
Edit3: When I entered the cave, the pedestal was empty. I put the rock on the pedestal and got a message that the exit was now open again (which didn't make sense, as it was open all along). When I removed the rock again, the exit was blocked. Is this really how it's supposed to be?
Edit4: I'm guessing that the stone is meant to be on the pedestal when you enter the cave, but as mentioned before, it isn't. However, you can magically make it appear by typing PUT STONE ON PEDESTAL - even though it never was in your inventory to begin with. But as far as I can tell, that bug is the only way of finishing the game at the moment.
Another thing: after taking (or smashing) the bee hive, it's still mentioned in the description of the place. Incidentally, isn't it slightly illogical that GET HONEY will result in you being stung to death by bees, while SMASH HIVE doesn't? I would have thought the bees wouldn't react too friendly if you smash their hive. Maybe you ought to distinguish between trying to smash the hive before and after driving the bees away.

Overall, it's a nice little game so far, but it would be even better if more commands were recognised. For example it took me quite a while to figure out, that you were supposed to BURN the mat, not LIGHT it.

[A. J. Raffles]

Another thing: the game obviously expects you to get the stone (once it's there, that is) through a partecular sequence of commands:
1. GET STONE (after which the cave exit is blocked)
2. PUT ROCK ON PEDESTAL (after which the exit is open again)

However, if if you do it the other way around:
1. PUT ROCK ON PEDESTAL
2. GET STONE
you get the "exit opens" message when putting the rock on the pedestal, even though it is still open and when you take away the stone (leaving the rock lying on the pedestal), the exit is blocked. The only way to unblock it again is to type TAKE ROCK and PUT ROCK ON PEDESTAL again.
I would have expected the game to recognise the command SWAP ROCK FOR STONE, by the way, but I suppose that's a minor detail...

[Taskmaster]

Well, that why you're beta testing it. I am trying to find the bugs. You would be amazed at how many lines of code there are for this game. I have to account for hundreds of things that you may or may not try.

For example, I never tried to put the rock on the pedestal until I looked at the pedestal, which then says that the stone is there. As the coder I know what is expected, so I have a hard time testing it. There is a rule that a programmer should not test his/her own code for just that reason.

Anyway, if you look at the pedestal first, then take the stone, etc. then it will work. I will, of couruse, correct the rock issue.

When you encounter and issue such as the smash thing, save the trace log so I can reproduce the issue easier. If you can give me a bit more detail as to what you did it will help.

As for Light I will check. I thought I had it working so it would tell you to BURN X with Y.

[Taskmaster]

I'm sorry for double posting, but this is for a different topic.

In the "old days" the games, for the most part, did not tell you the commands that were allowed, and that is how I grew up on the games. I had to work out the commands. I am trying to make the puzzle frustrating not the commands. To that end I have included as many synonyms as I can for the various commands.

I wanted to hear what you all think. Should I have a "Commands," "Verbs" or "Vocabulary" type command that would list the known verbs or not?


By the way, if you come across a situation, such as A. J. Raffles did, where SWAP was tried, let me know and I will see if I can implemented it. I will look at adding SWAP (EXCHANGE)