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I really love the atmosphere that you've created, but it can get a bit frustrating as you climb higher in the tower. I don't think I'll be able to get much further than the 65th floor without some kind off cheat, it's true. But the graphics and sound remind me of the sort of games they made back in '84.

Thirded! This is very generous of everyone involved. I'm especially happy to have been selected for a book, as they look very interesting and I already have Pico-8.

I just watched you play my game. Thanks so much! And you stayed with it for so long, even though you got stuck on the third chapter. Your thinking was sound, but unfortunately not the right solution for my game.

There was a great moment when you said, "Maybe I need to wrap the coal in the handkerchief?" and I clapped my hands and cheered (although the coal is actually part of the fourth chapter), but almost immediately I was kicking myself because either the exact phrasing you used or the fact that you'd already picked up the coal (I'm not sure which, maybe both) tripped up my code and gave you an error message. Then you gave up on that idea. D'oh!

I know that the "HELP" text looked like boring boilerplate (my fault), but if you'd read it you might've gotten some important info. ;)

Thanks for your post! In terms of game dev experience and age, we seem to be similar; I also did most of my text adventuring in my teens to early twenties, which was about 20 years ago. :)

Looking again at the door-opening sequence, I can see a couple of places where I could've dropped more and/or more obvious clues as to what needs to be done. I'll probably go back and modify those parts later, but I'm also thinking about writing up a full walkthrough, as you suggest, but separate from the game. I'll link to it on the game's page, and possibly offer a link within the game, maybe once all hints for an area have been exhausted.

Thanks for your feedback! Yes, looking at the other entries in this game jam, as well as some other Adventuron-based games, I'm wondering if I didn't make my game a bit too wordy! But I'm glad to hear that I managed to keep you on the hook for some of it. :)

This might be the black sheep of the game jam! Right off the bat, it's impressive that you managed to create such an off-target but still polished and enjoyable game with the Adventuron engine. The graphics are very well done, and really fit the mood of the rest of the game. At first I thought it was going to be almost a straight visual novel, but it quickly started to remind me more of the Professor Layton series; a bit of story, a bit of exploration, a puzzle, and then repeat.

It did seem strange to me just how much Pel had managed to insert herself into your time at the office, even once I read the epilogue. And despite all the indications given on the game's page and in the game itself, I didn't want to call her because it felt like asking for a hint to me, and I wanted to solve the various puzzles on my own. However, I don't think that anyone would be able to solve the password puzzle without calling her at least twice! Still, I had a very fun time with this game.

This is a very weird game, but please take that as a compliment! The game world is full of talking birds, books with strange titles, and very friendly people who are just waiting around to help you, but it all fits together in a charming way. The graphics are really lovely, and definitely get some of the highest marks from me for this game jam. They are in a pixel art style that I haven't seen very often, but I really like it.

The most interesting part of the game for an author/programmer would have to be the bread-sharing puzzle, which is generated randomly each time. That must have been almost as much work as the rest of the game! Although it occasionally throws out some variations that are hard to fit together, the game doesn't seem to punish the player for getting the wrong answer, no matter how many times they have to retry the puzzle. I had a very fun time playing through this game.

This is an engaging and entertaining game. The graphics are well done, and give a good sense of location that reinforces the text descriptions. On a second playthrough, just before entering my ratings, I noticed that you had moved quite a few of the locations around since my first playthrough, which was before the submission deadline. Since the puzzles remained the same, my guess is that you did this so that players would be forced through certain locations before others, in order to guide our thinking.

I was disappointed that with at least three places in the game world where we should be able to get cold water, it's still only possible to solve the puzzle that requires it in one of those places. But other than that, the solutions to puzzles make sense, and weren't too tricky for me.

I think that this is the most expansive game in this jam! As with "Treasures of HollowHill", every time that I thought I was nearing the end, a new area or puzzle chain opened up. This was also the last game that I finished, by a long stretch; I played through the rest of the entries over a couple of days, but I was stumped more than once here, and I was about to give up on finishing Northpole before submitting my reviews. But one last thought while re-reading the hints you gave me let me find that last present.

Some of the hints misled me, such as hearing so often about the frozen ground that I failed to try digging somewhere necessary later on until I saw another player do so. And the description of Lori's face being in shadow, paired with Rudolph's glowing nose and expectant look, led to me spending far longer than I would like to admit trying to talk to a reindeer. But those were my fault. There were some puzzles that felt a bit unfair, too, such as being unable to open a barrel with either an axe or a screwdriver, but instead needing to use a weaker item, and one also devilishly hard for me to find. Having examined the first bit of scenery, I would have expected to have noticed anything useful without having to explicitly examine the second bit of sub-scenery to find that item.

Overall, though, Northpole kept me engaged the whole time, and certainly delivered an interesting experience. And I would say that the graphics are the best in the entire jam, despite some of the very stiff competition that they're up against in that regard.

This was a very small but beautifully-formed game. Although graphics and text were both minimal, everything necessary for an interesting experience was present, and my playthrough was very enjoyable, no matter how brief. The one thing that I would suggest is making the required placement of the ball clearer. From the description, it seems like it could stay where you find it, although with the small number of locations to try and an educated guess, finding the correct placement wasn't too difficult in the end.

I really enjoyed this game! It had a kind of "deserted" feel, but in a good way. Somehow, it gave me a similar feeling to some of From Software's earlier games like the King's Field series, Evergrace, or Eternal Ring (although these days they're better known for Demon's Souls and Bloodborne). The puzzles were just right for me, and I loved the way that you recast familiar Anglophone Christmas traditions as things that belong more clearly to another place or time.

The super-blocky, minimalist graphics only added to the feeling of showing small pockets of detail in an expansive world. I've sometimes noticed a similar mood in Scandanavian films.

This is a fantastic take on Santa's operation portrayed as a commercial business, but with the added twist of cyberpunk which you've somehow made fit perfectly. I was a little disappointed that there doesn't seem to be more than one way to end the game, given the circumstances. Perhaps there is, and I just didn't find it, but the responses that the game gave me to my attempts made me think otherwise.

It's a very small thing, but the grading system is confusing to me. I got an A rank on my first playthrough, and on my second playthrough the only things that I consciously did differently were to go faster (obviously) and to deliberately leave my vest at the delivery point, but this time I got an S rank. I had imagined that getting a better rank would involve doing something significantly differently. If leaving my vest behind was the key, the epilogue didn't seem to change in any way to indicate it.

Your graphics made good use of colour, and details were picked out recognisably, adding impact to your text descriptions.

This was probably my favourite entry in this jam, in terms of the actual puzzles/mechanics. I was a bit nervous at first that limiting the player only to GET/DROP would make things too easy, but I didn't reckon on you "resetting" the world after incorrect attempts. I'm a big proponent of games that offer a large number of permutations via a small number of inputs, but this approach tends to break down when it comes to parser-based games. Thanks for showing me another way!

Even though they were low-resolution photos, your graphics looked really good. It looks like you carefully reduced the colour palette for each image (and perhaps touched them up a little), giving them a consistent level of detail and avoiding a "multicoloured snow" look.

I would definitely class this game as "short and sweet", which is not only welcome, but actually a bonus considering that it has some replayability in the form of a randomly-selected present required to help Santa. The achievements board after completion was a nice extra touch, and I was simultaneously annoyed and impressed that save-scumming didn't fool it! A couple of the puzzles weren't so intuitive before finding the solution (if that makes sense?), but I didn't have much trouble solving any of them just by trying everything that I had to hand.

Also, your graphics set the scene nicely, despite their low resolution, which is quite a feat!

This was an interesting game to play, and it took me a few breaks away from the keyboard, mulling things over, to solve all of the puzzles. Each of the "cases" worked really well, and were satisfying to solve, because they all made sense in terms of the story. One constructive thing I would say is that there were a couple of situations where puzzles required multiple steps to solve, and I wished there had been a hint that I was on the right track after having done one or two of the steps. The example that sticks out in my mind is (being vague to avoid spoilers) how to deal with the campers in the woods. Having taken one step that seemed necessary (and turned out to be correct), the campers didn't change their reaction to me at all, so I thought for a while that I had the wrong idea.

Finally, I think that you managed to pull off the very low resolution graphics nicely, and gave each location a nice flavour that supported the text very well.

Your graphics were wonderfully balanced, with just enough detail to really encourage suspension of disbelief. It's easy to focus too much on the main subject of an image, and leave backgrounds too vague and empty, but you avoided that trap very well.

I also liked that most of the right materials for each toy could be collected from the various storerooms. But there's a fine line between a low-level puzzle that draws the player in, and annoying busywork that pushes them away, and it's a line that moves depending on the player. For me, having to ask Neldor about each child individually was a step too far, while looking up the requirements for each toy didn't feel as tedious since I could focus on one or two toys at a time. It may be that the magic list backfired a bit there, since it really highlights the repetitive nature of asking about each child.

Other than that niggle, the puzzles were well thought-out, and I mostly found the solutions without too much hair-pulling. The game was very enjoyable overall, and absorbed me quite thoroughly while I was playing it.

Ah, the power of posting! I found the hint as to the specific verb that I needed to use with the "elf". I haven't played this new chapter out yet, but I have a feeling, looking at the other comments, that there's still something unrelated to this that needs to be done.

The graphics in your game are amazing! Yours is the last game that I need to finish before I make my ratings, but I seem to be completely stuck. My score is 5/7, and I've fixed the sleigh, but I don't know what to do next. I've met a suspicious "elf" in a backyard who won't talk to me, and a sneaking suspicion that if I knew what to say to a certain character, they would follow me to help me get a better look at his face. I have some seemingly useful socks but nowhere obvious to use them. I can't use the chimney. Finally, there's a suspicious stump in the woods with something stuck in the trees nearby, but I can't seem to do anything with either of them. Is there any chance of a nudge in the right direction?

This is a very nice game, and I really love the graphics, but I've hit a snag. I've made every present and put it on the sleigh, and I've also retrieved the gingerbread, but I can't give it to Mrs Claus. When I try, she thanks me but says that she's only interested in the gingerbread. Also, my score is 90/100 when I suspect that it ought to be 95/100. It's as though I don't have the gingerbread at all, even though it's in my inventory, and dropping/taking it gives the expected responses. The credits text list the version as 0.0.4.

I wrote a text-only postmortem for my entry on my 'blog, in case you'd like to read it.

If anyone is interested, I wrote a (rather rambling) postmortem for "Deck the Halls, Gieves" on my 'blog.

I wouldn't mind knowing that myself. The meaning of "download" seems straightforward for games which use a binary/installer, but it's less clear for embedded HTML5 games. I used to think that for an embedded game, a "download" represented someone actually clicking on the game window in order to play it, but my HTML5 entries in other jams have registered more ratings than downloads, so the numbers don't seem to match up.

Thanks for your feedback! Yes, there are a fair few failings in my game that I know of, that I didn't get around to fixing before I ran out of time. I'm fixing some of the smaller ones as I go along, hoping that not too many people are playing my game yet, but some things like the limited number of location graphics are probably not going to be a part of that. Adding a caption as you suggest may be a good compromise. I'll be writing a post-mortem in the next day or two and posting it to my 'blog, which will probably talk about several points like this.

The bookshop bug is one that I think I caught and patched just before I read your comment, so now hopefully Bartie won't find the book at all until he's met the collector. The "missing" scenery items might remain so unless/until I do a revised version after judging has finished, because as much as they break immersion, I don't think that they heavily impact the overall flow of the game.

I've also just added a hint system, which may help you if you're still stuck. Just type HINT at the prompt to see how it works!

I had some spare time today, so I've added a hint system to the game for those who are getting stuck; I've had mentions from a few people, not only comments here on itch.io. Just like most authors, I didn't think that my puzzles were that hard, but of course I already know the solutions! :)

Type HINT at the prompt to get your first hint, and also some instructions on how to use the hint system. The hints are revealed one stage at a time, as you ask for them, and still don't ever give the out-and-out solution (but they do come pretty close to it).

Good luck, Gymcrash! I'm very interested to play your entry when I get a chance.

And good luck to everyone! I hope that we all made something that we're mostly happy with (it's never perfect, is it? ;) ).

Have you tried the post office? They're closed, but carefully reading the sign about their holiday hours might help you.

That was a good thought, looking for coins in the fountain! I hadn't considered that. I'll try to make an update that deals with it.

Hi Errol, I'm glad that you read everything! I know it's quite a lot, so I'm worried that it might put some people off. If it's not too much trouble, I'd like to see your transcript, yes. I might be able to slip in a few more improvements before too many people get to look at my entry :)

Thanks for the tips, old chap!

I had set those values in the font definition, but I had incorrectly assumed that the 8x14 font would be 8x14 pixels. The site that I downloaded it from did mention something about scaling, so this is probably related. However, setting the definition to 8x16 has made the text teeny-tiny, and very difficult to read on my laptop's 1366x768 screen. Is there some way to force Adventuron to be a bit more liberal with the scaling? I found that if I use the browser's zoom functionality to zoom out one step to 90%, Adventuron will automatically make the font a much more readable size. And if I zoom in to 200% it looks great, but between 100% and 150% or so, the text is too small to read comfortably. Playing with the zoom makes me think that Adventuron has a pretty robust scaling system that unfortunately just happens to break down only at resolutions around my laptop's screen resolution.

I tried adjusting  "font_scale_multiplier", but nothing seemed to happen. I also fudged the font size to 16x32, which made the text blow up massively in the editor (to what looked more like 3x or 4x rather than 2x) for some reason, but worked in a compiled version. However, I'm assuming that this would interfere with Adventuron's scaling system, so I'm loathe to do it. I also tried adjusting the "columns" property in the theme; at 40 columns the text was a good size and very sharp, but the display was limited to the middle 2/5 of the screen. Other column settings that I tried all looked similar to the 80 columns that I started with.

By the way, when adjusting the zoom level in Firefox 83.0, the font still showed non-integer scaling at many levels, with either blurring or distortion visible on the letters. From working on another game in JavaScript/HTML5, I know what a pain it can be to get browsers to scale pixel art in integers. Even when you give them the perfect resources and instructions, they seem determined suddenly to change their behaviour to something else only in those "perfect" cases! In the end, I gave up for my HTML5 game and just resigned myself to having slightly blurry pixels. My target resolution is so low by modern standards that most people will hardly notice anyway.

Checking the itch.io settings on my beta, it looks like I missed 9E. Oops!

And thanks for pointing out how to make clickable directions. One of my beta testers also found that instances of defined nouns are automatically made clickable in the text, which I didn't know about.

Hello all! The last time I entered an Adventuron Jam, someone started up a thread like this for my entry, and it seemed like a good idea to do it again.

At the moment I have a beta version of my game uploaded to my account. I'm in two minds about letting people play it, since it's still some way from what I hope to have in my final entry, but it's currently functionally complete, and I'd say that ignoring the missing graphics, it's about 98% of the way to where I want it to be. If you can spare the time to take a look and offer any constructive criticism, I'd be grateful.

EDIT: Removed link to beta version. It is no longer available as I have submitted my full entry.

Newer versions of Windows Paint (since XP or Vista, IIRC) have all sorts of antialiasing features built in. Enough people missed using it to make clean pixel art that someone recreated the older version of paint to run in newer editions of Windows.

1. At the moment, my map has 23 actual, visitable locations. It's only dawned on me in the last few days that this means that I may actually have to create 23 location graphics, so I'm thinking of ways to cut down the number of locations, and to reuse some location graphics, especially since some of these locations are mainly present for flavour. I have four puzzle "sets", you might say, each of which consists of 2-4 puzzles, by your definition.

2. Can there be such a thing as too small a text adventure game?  Even one location can be enough. In terms of puzzles, though, I'd like to have a good handful; a bare minimum of 3, I should say, by your definition. Let's not bicker over "one move" games like "Aisle", since they're clearly intended to be played multiple "times" in rapid succession. :)

3. I feel that "too big" depends on the relative density of interactive elements, not absolute size. A game with an enormous absolute size might be tiring, even if well-crafted, but I think that it's more common for adventures to be created with more locations than the amount of interactive elements (objects, puzzles, examinable scenery) can support. It's tempting to create locations because they should "logically" be present (especially when working in text only), even when they have nothing to do with the puzzles or story. The narration in my game jam entry is in the past tense this time, so it feels like less of a cop-out to tell the player, "I didn't go that way," in some interesting way, rather than having to say, "I don't want to go that way," and have the player wondering, "Why on Earth not?!"

I've never thought specifically about "ensuring engagement", but it's a very interesting train of thought. I guess that I've taken a sort of "all roads lead to Rome" approach; I try to give interesting responses for every reasonable action that I can imagine a player trying to take, but also slipping in hints and references to continually highlight what I think they "should" be doing. The difficulty is making it appear natural, and not hitting the player over the head with it. If the player wants to explore my little world, that's great, but I want to make sure that they're never at a complete loss for a next step. At the same time, I don't want to take all the fun out of the game by telling them exactly what to do next.

I wanted to try a custom font this time around, and it would really have enhanced some of my abandoned ideas. But for my final concept, I've settled on making my game look like it's running in EGA hi-res mode, so I'm using a standard EGA font that I downloaded from this site. It really looks perfect in Adventuron!

I'm sticking rigidly to a two-word maximum.

Some actions really do require more than two words to describe properly, and that's a limitation that I've struggled with; on this project, I've actually moved locations around and changed some aspects of puzzles to avoid ambiguities that would require longer commands. But I find that it's often possible to rework things to avoid those actions, and I also like being able to tell the player, "If you can't think of a way to explain what you want the PC to do with a VERB NOUN pair, it's not necessary in this game."

My design philosophy is that once the player has guessed the action that's necessary to progress, the game should give the player every benefit of the doubt. Situations where, for example, I couldn't (as a player) "BREAK LOCK",  "USE CROWBAR", or "PRY LOCK", nor "BREAK LOCK WITH HAMMER" or "BREAK LOCK WITH ROCK", but I could only "BREAK LOCK WITH CROWBAR" feel unnecessarily coy to me, and I feel like that's the sort of puzzle writing that more complex commands can sometimes encourage. If I've already guessed that the way forward is to apply brute force to the lock, and I have a selection of sturdy implements to hand, including the "correct" one (another annoying issue in TA/IF), is it really necessary to make me try each one systematically?

I'm not accusing anyone here of that; I'm just explaining that I think that sticking to two-word commands helps me not to fall into those traps as an author.

Ha ha, yes, I've already noticed a bunch of significant new features that I'm sure weren't there a few months ago!

Thanks for the compliment! Your game in the two-word jam was amazing.

I think I've got my opening down. I cut out several lines of waffle about prior events that I realised didn't impact the main story at all, and changed the introduction of a major character into a new area and puzzle at the start of the game. Now I'm down to 4 short paragraphs, most of which is a conversation.

Ha ha! I was originally going to use Die Hard as my example for 3, but I was worried about how many people would remember that it's set at Christmas.

Oh, no worries at all! I consider the issue to be very much on me, and not on Adventuron Classroom! As you say, the existing documentation has some rather advanced material for beginners, even without looking at the more arcane examples in the "Cookbook". And as I say, the in-editor help is really doing the trick for me. I don't think that I properly understood how to use it, last time.

I've had to tear myself away from a few interesting concepts because I wasn't getting enough good puzzle ideas. But a couple of days ago I hit upon a setting that I've managed to flesh out into a small adventure on paper. So far, in terms of coding, I've mostly been doing more thorough research/tinkering with Adventuron itself (I really flew by the seat of my pants, last time!), and I'm starting to get a feel for the design philosophy behind it.

At the moment, my opening text is about half-finished and it already feels rather long to me, so I'm trying to think of a way to get some of that information/setup into the game proper, perhaps as another puzzle.

The writing is a bit slow-going as I'm having to rewrite things multiple times to get them to feel sufficiently "Wodehousian" when I read them back... ;)

One of the challenges that I've had with Adventuron is with the documentation. There's a lot of good info there, but it's laid out very much in an order to be followed as a guide for a beginner (which makes sense), but I'd like more of a programmer's reference/overview. I don't know if it was as well-developed the last time that I used it, but I'm finding that the in-editor "Ctrl-Space" hint system is filling a lot of that gap for me this time.

I still haven't completely settled on a setting/concept. I've had a few really interesting ideas, but I just couldn't figure out how to integrate good puzzles into them quickly enough. I might have an OK idea now, but I'm curious about how strongly everyone is following the Christmas theme. On a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is "Ring", 5 is "The Santa Clause", and 3 is "Home Alone", where would you say that your idea falls? I think I'm looking at a 3 right now, but trying to think of a way to bump it up to a 3.5 or a 4.

I skipped the last Adventuron jam because I was so inspired by the previous one (and another game jam) that I started making my own "full-sized" game in my spare time. I'm still working on that, slowly but surely, but I'm feeling the itch to make a text adventure again. So, after sitting on the fence, hemming and hawing about it, I've decided to jump in an make something. I have a concept inspired by one of the suggestions, although I'm not 100% sure of how well it will translate into an actual game. We'll see!