Post by Garry Francis in Comments on 'Escape The Cave Of Magic'

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I just finished. Nice game, but there are a few bugs that others have already mentioned. In fairness to the other authors, here's my test notes with bugs and/or suggestions that you may want to consider if you do an upgrade.

General comments:
Don't use press_any_key when you're only printing a sentence or two. This should only be used before refreshing the whole screen.
Delete all spaces before colons and exclamation marks.
If you remove the helmet, nothing happens until you type LOOK or move to a different room. It should happen straight away.
There are three tiny dots that appear in a few places, such as "somewhere...surrounded" in the first location. These are probably some sort of special character in the font you're using. Replace it with a space, space dash space, comma space or full stop, as appropriate.

Hole:
"into some hole" should be "in a hole".
"an helmet" should be "a helmet".
When you find the helmet, it is not added as an object in the room. When you get the helmet, you can X HOLE and it is removed from your inventory and disappears. If you wear the helmet and X HOLE, it is removed from your inventory and disappears. When you drop the helmet, it disappears. You can X HOLE and it keeps reappearing, yet disappearing, over and over again.

Beautiful Cave:
"as energy" should be "as an energy source".

Cave of Magic:
"either east, south or west" should be "east, south and west".
If you can smell decomposing corpses, you should be able to SMELL them.
If something rumbles, you should be able to LISTEN.
"South tunnel" should be "south tunnel".

Near Exit of Cave of Magic:
Add full stop at end of description.
"fall asleep" should be "falls asleep".
"EXIT OF" should be "EXIT OUT OF".
X TROLL: "stings" should probably be "needles"; "That explains how" should be "That probably explains why".
WAKE TROLL: "moarns" should be "moans".
USE BONE: "moarns" should be "moans".

Abandoned Orchard:
If you get orange and EXAMINE TREES, the orange is stolen from you and reappears in the room.
If you eat the orange, it reappears in the room.
How do you eat an orange when you're wearing a helmet?

Beautiful Lake:
If you X BOAT, it says "The hole is 2 cm diameter, but when you X HOLE, it says "There is no hole here". You should give a description of the hole, even if it's just to repeat that "it's 2 cm in diameter". Better still, don't tell us about the size of the hole when we examine the boat, but tell us when we examine the hole.
Rather than USE RING, allow for commands like INSERT RING, PUT RING, PLACE RING, PLUG HOLE, MEND HOLE, FIX HOLE, REPAIR HOLE and so on.
X BOAT after fixing it and the hole is still there.

In Boat:
X BOAT: "The old wooden boat is not here." If it's not here, then how are you sitting in it?

Pontoon:
"at the North" should be "at the north".
X BOAT: (There's still a hole in it.)

Wet and Muddy Sand:
X KNIGHT: Here you said "armour", but back at the cave, you said "armor". I prefer the former, because I'm an Aussie, but be consistent.
TALK KNIGHT: "starring" should be "staring".

Forest Path:
"trees over" should be "trees tower over"; "in thick vegetations" should be "because of thick vegetation".

Perched on Branch:
"Above you" should be "Above, you".
"an hermit" should be "a hermit".
Delete full stop at the end of "a young savage hermit.".
X HERMIT: "hematomes" should be "hematoma" (US English) or "haematoma" (UK English), but the more common term is "bruises"; "difficulties to move" should be "difficulty moving".
GIVE ORANGE: "clairing" should be "clearing".

Middle of Clearing:
"clairing" should be "clearing".

Inside Spaceship:
GIVE CRYSTAL says "You can't offer what you don't have", even if you have it.

Adventuron5 years ago

Generally speaking, good constructive points, although rather harsh too.

About this:

"Don't use press_any_key when you're only printing a sentence or two. This should only be used before refreshing the whole screen."

I agree that press_any_key should usually not be used if printing a single sentence without a screen refresh, but it can be used before a screen refresh, and in the middle of printing two large paragraphs.

For example see the introduction to DEER CREEK by 8bitAG. Lots of use of press_any_keys to deliver story. I think it works well. Not everywhere, but where there is a lot of text to be delivered - yes.

8bitAG5 years ago

My personal rule, and this comes from doing 8-bit games in specific engines like the PAWs, is never to use a press_any_key in an instance when you return straight to the command line. It just feels and looks very odd to me. A lot of that is just down to what I'm used to after playing old-school text adventures for years (and years).

If you want to return to the command line, without clearing the screen, then I would use a pause instead. It allows the reader to take in the text in chunks, or at least appreciate they are chunks of text.

As Chris said, I often use press_any_keys between short lines of text when I want to deliberately build tension or create timing and space for the punchline of a joke. Even then, I always follow my own rule of terminating any such delivery with a clear screen/redescribe.

(Rules are there to be broken. You should feel free to develop your own style. This is just what a lot of older players will be used to.)

Adventuron5 years ago

The : stagger ""; command will place press_any_key events between paragraphs, but not after the final paragraph (if there is just one paragraph, there are no press_any_keys). For large amounts of dialog, without any beeps inbetween, stagger is the lazy way to do it.

Agree with Gareth. Returning to the command line after a final press_any_key without a screen refresh just feels wrong to me.

Sleuthgames5 years ago (2 edits)

Thanks you very much for your exhaustive report.

Sorry for my English mistake. I did all of this alone. It's a lot of code learning, writing and gfx for an in-experimented French Adventuron coder like me.

Q: You don't recommend dots used for suspense ? Or you can't see the symbol ingame ? … (ALT-0133 …) is the right typo for ... (dot dot dot which is wrong).

Garry Francis5 years ago (1 edit)

In some cases, you used dot dot dot (it's called an ellipsis). That's okay. In others you used the single ellipsis character and it's almost invisible. I'd suggest changing the single ellipsis character with the three separate dots. It looks much better.

Considering English is not your native language, you've done a great job. That's why I thought you might appreciate some little corrections to the English. In fact, all the non-English speakers did a great job!

itch.io

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