[Art of Fugue] Open Alpha 2

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The development of my/our puzzle game The Art of Fugue (see my earlier posts here and here) is going well, and today I would like to present the second open alpha to you. You can find the game file here, and the source here.


What is new? The fourth puzzle has been removed, as has the functionality that made it possible to solve this puzzle. However, four new puzzles have been added. The new puzzle four is some fun with mathematics. The fifth puzzle, contributed by Jimmy Maher and Dorte Lassen is about movement; I have used their code to create puzzle six. Puzzle seven is about making indistinguishable objects distinguishable.

I believe that puzzle six and seven are of a higher difficulty than puzzle one to five. Puzzle six seemed especially hard, but it is possible that I have simply missed an easier solution.

Also new is the menu system. You can now switch between puzzles through the menu. As you progress new puzzles will become unlocked. The game keeps track of which puzzles you solved, and also of how many turns it took you. It has a built-in database of best solution times, and will compare your solution with the best known solution. It can print your solution to the screen so you can mail it to me if you have improved on the best known solution!

You can still switch between all puzzles--even blocked puzzles--by typing "next puzzle" and "previous puzzle". These commands will be removed in the final release. There is also a cheat code that will unblock all puzzles: "bwv1080".

The one known bug is that you can still sometimes get parser questions, and these will break the game. This happens only when you type a verb that requires an object without an object, like "take". Please refrain from doing this while testing the game.

What do we need right now? More contributions! Follow the lead of Jimmy and Dorte and add your own puzzle to The Art of Fugue!

Ideally, we would have about 20 puzzles in the first release, which I'm planning for the last days of 2009. I think the mininum is 12 or so.

Especially welcome would be puzzles of intermediate to hard difficulty, and puzzles that make interesting use of the parser; but please send in your easy puzzles as well. (If we have too many easy puzzles, we can always try to make them harder.)

Comments

  1. Victor Gijsbers13 October 2009 at 01:20

    I have posted a slightly updated game version (behind the same link). It no longer clears the screen immediately after showing the banner/introduction. :)

    It also theoretically has cover art, but I couldn't see it. This might be due to Gargoyle, but I'm not sure. Please tell me whether you do/do not see cover art.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jimmy Maher13 October 2009 at 08:34

    Nope, no cover art. The file you've posted isn't even a .gblorb, just a bare .ulx file. You might want to check Inform 7 under the Settings tab. Make sure you have "Create a .blorb file" (or similar) checked.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Victor Gijsbers13 October 2009 at 10:34

    Ah, right, that's probably what is happening. I was choosing .ulx instead of .gblorb because some people had trouble opening the .gblorb last time; but I understand from your comment that a .ulx cannot contain cover art.

    Inform 7 might have warned me about that...

    ReplyDelete

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