Caltrops - The King of Shreds and Patches

Forum Overview :: The King of Shreds and Patches

by Ice Cream Jonsey 02/24/2010, 10:21am PST

Bananadine wrote:

It turned out that the time-stopping thing wasn't a bug, but then I went a little further and ran out of options again. There are a couple of obvious solutions to my problems (including, again, waiting for evening) but the game won't let me enact them. Still no walkthrough, soooo that's the end of that!

I guess the conventional thing to do here is to bang one's head against the problem until luck or sudden insight produces the solution? Or is it generally accepted that there'll be a few people who will do that, and somehow have fun doing it, and that at least one of them will produce a walkthrough for everybody else to fall back on when this happens? Hm maybe Get Lamp will provide the answer.

Well, IF is more fun to play when other people are playing "with" you, either virtually or in the same room. I got stuck in Narcolepsy, and went onto the ifMud to ask for help. When I was told the solution, I realized the problem was all me: I glossed over the fact that a spear was in the same room as me or something. So the solution made me go, "oh! I should have thought of that."

As long as an IF game moves in that direction, everyone's cool. I think what people tend to do when they get stuck is:

- post on rec.games.int-fiction. This newsgroup has really gone downhill over the years, but you can get a hint there.

- post on intfiction.org. This is a perfectly fine forum. The link to discussion about games is here and someone had also made a thread about Shred and Patches here.

- write the author, although nobody wants to be the guy who writes the author 50 times

- talk about it with others playing, which would normally be valid here, except I'm cramming for PAX.

So yeah, nobody wants to register for yet another web forum account, but I'd guess that someone has been through what you've been through, and the intfiction.org forum would provide answers. You do remind me that I should update the "what do I do if I get stuck" message in the game I am working on. People used to mimic invisi-clues in their own games, but authors figured out that if you did that, it would cut down on discussion, since people wouldn't go elsewhere for help. Discussion is really the currency authors of IF get paid in. But as the general level of discussion has plummeted, invisi-hints inside a game seem better.

ICJ