Stale Tales Slate: two re-releases

Already posted at intfiction.org, but this is a big enough event for me, it goes on my blog.

I'm happy to announce that I have re-released versions of Shuffling Around (v4) and A Roiling Original (v3), the two games in my Stale Tales Slate.

They feature a lot of bug fixes and features, and while bugs are lurking, I think the main things are:

• puzzles are fixed so as to be sensible
• major bugs have been paved over
• there's increased user-friendliness
• Color trizbort maps! Visit http://bit.ly/trizbortjl if you want to draw up your own. They're a nice addition to any release, big or small. They helped keep up my morale when I saw a stupid bug I made.

The total source code is over 3 megs. This is a bit ridiculous, and a lot is due to the random text, but--I'm proud of my perseverance, even if sometimes I didn't attack the VERY highest priority bugs. The cool thing about text adventures is, player don't have to look at all the random stuff--but if it catches their fancy, it's there for them. And it's (I think) pretty clearly labeled in the source code.

Many people helped with Roiling version 3, including Mr. Patient who was, well, patient with my being slow with transcript. Changes are included in the change log. Matt Weiner helped with Shuffling version 4. If any bugs are left, there were a lot worse bugs before.

 

Well, actually, I saw one. Each region in Roiling has an item that you can use to get a hint. But the problem is, if an object has already been hinted, this duplicates the HINT capability. So I would like to attend to that. This is a case where I saw a fix but I wanted to get things done this month and not introduce any bugs with feature creep. So, next release it is!

 

The games are submitted to the IFArchive but until then there are dropbox links.

Shuffling: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4kbj5vy3tu3uu ... 4.zip?dl=0
Roiling: https://www.dropbox.com/s/z0isqt874lsdv ... 3.zip?dl=0

The change logs are here:

Shuffling: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5k6bfey3siz0s ... s.txt?dl=0
Roiling: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6l143giywshs4 ... s.txt?dl=0

 

I may go into detail later. But for now, I think I can move on to my next projects. I started looking at things about three years ago, and now things are finally in a maintenance state. (I think!) I had a lot of fun mucking around. But I have new ideas. And quite bluntly, as fun as finding some cool words, phrases, etc. can be, I've got anagram fatigue.