Messages

Er... actually, unless there's some randomization involved (which seems unlikely), that answer is incorrect...

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The key in the nightstand doesn't go to the crypt.  It goes to her diary, found elsewhere in the same room.

The key to the crypt is hanging on a tree elsewhere in the forest, in the room with the guy by the campfire.  By now I've forgotten how to distract him so you can take the key, and unless someone really needs to know I don't feel like replaying that part of the game to remind myself, but I think there was a dialogue option that made him look away briefly.

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Right, although I'd apparently remembered him repeating the word more times than he actually does.

You realize that already exists, right?

I... actually did not realize that.  Hm.  Oh well.

It was a stupid idea anyway.  Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid...

An interesting area to explore would be why bad film plots make good game plots.

Really?  Well, that bodes well for one of my intended future projects, Plan 9 From Outer Space: The Adventure Game.

You never do end up going

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inside the church

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or using

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the knife or the duct tape

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.  (At least, I didn't, unless there's some alternate solution involving them.)

You are, however, very close to the end.

Uncover one hint at a time until you're no longer stuck.

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If you've been inside the lighthouse, you must have traveled to 1985, right?  (Otherwise you wouldn't have gotten the notebook entry that gave you the code for the lighthouse turbine.)  Did you accomplish anything there?

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Yes, besides seeing the guy wave to you on the sailboat.  There's something else you needed to look at.

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Did you take a close look at the photo on the table on the patio?

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Make a note of which brick is circled on the photo.

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Now, go back to 2008 and return to the patio in that time frame...

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Find the right brick and interact with it.

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OK, now interact with the control panel that should have come up.

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If you've done all you say you've done, all the lights on the control panel should already be lit.  All you have to do is press the big button at the bottom...

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Just finished the game... a lot of nice touches.  I liked the fact that the yellow arrows showed where to leave a room; it's always frustrating when you don't know where the exits are and have to randomly stumble around the room's edges to find them.  That being said, though, some of the exits may have been a little too small; even with the yellow arrows, a few exits were hard to find.  In particular, it took me a little while to find my way back out of the silo basement, and I was stuck for quite a while near the end of the game simply because there were two rooms I hadn't seen because the exit to get to them was so easy to miss.

(More specifically:

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I knew I had to go to Finger Rock to find the third attractor, but I had no idea where Finger Rock was, and couldn't find it.  Finally, wandering randomly and searching every room again, I figured out that I could go right from the sculpture garden room, and it led to somewhere different than going down.  This wasn't at all obvious to me, and, as I said, left me stuck for a long time before I found it.

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)

There were a few minor bugs and typos I may as well point out, though, in case you want to fix them.  They're not all spoilers, but I'll put them behind spoiler tags just in case.

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Probably the biggest bug is that the lever on the lighthouse turbine shows up as being in the "Off" position from the beginning, when it's supposed to be "On".  (Although it does show correctly in the close-up of the lock... and it does still show as being in the "Off" position after it's actually turned off; there's a sound as if the lever moves, but the graphic doesn't change.)  This had me confused for quite a while, because I didn't know why the turbine wasn't turning if the brakes were off.  I figured either there was no wind, and I had to generate wind somehow, or I just didn't have the right code yet and the lever's showing as off was a bug.  Turns out it was the latter, but it was really misleading.

For some reason, the first time I tried the code on the silo turbine it didn't work.  (Maybe because I had tried it on the lighthouse turbine first?  Although then, why should that also set the code on the silo turbine?)  I had to cycle the first symbol all the way back around before it registered.

There's a typo on the sign in the sculpture garden: it says "Sclupture Garden" instead.

When you look at the silo from the beach after the dome is open, the player says it "Look's kind of scary."  There shouldn't be an apostrophe there.

In the basketball court, just left of the hoop, it looks like a small tree was accidentally pasted in front of a large tree in the background, making it look like either the small tree is floating in the air or a small tree-shaped part of the large tree is inexplicably a slightly brighter color.

There are two misuses of "whomever", one in the letter found in the notebook ("To whomever reads this"), and one in the last notebook entry ("whomever he or she is").  Those are both incorrect; they should be "whoever".  "Whomever" is only used in the objective case, and grammatically both of those instances should be in the subjective.

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Anyway, like I said, just wanted to point out those details in case you were interested in fixing them.  (Though I'd imagine some of them -- the Sculpture Garden sign in particular -- might be kind of hard to fix at this stage, and maybe not worth the trouble.)  Overall, though, it's clear you put a lot of work into this game, and it had some very well done puzzles.

That's more or less what I was saying; I just put it a little more technically (and therefore perhaps more confusingly).  Instead of trying to break the sentence down into parts, I was just looking at where the complement of the clause was (the part that the "is" works to equate to the "it") -- if the complement comes after the "it is", it's okay to contract the "it is"; if not (because the complement comes before the "it is" or because it's omitted), it's not.  I think you seem to be defining the "part of the sentence" in question as the "it is" plus the complement, which means that the "it is" comes at that end of the "part of the sentence" if and only if the complement doesn't come after the "it is".  So I think you're saying about the same thing I was, just in different words.

On a not altogether related note, though, I've been rethinking what I said in the last paragraph in response to Snarky about there never being any cases where "it is" is ungrammatical but "it's" is okay.  Actually, in fact, I kind of contradicted myself in that post by giving a counterexample: as I said, you'd rarely, if ever, hear anyone say "it is me".  ("It's me", sure, "it is I", rare and a little pompous but not altogether unknown, but "it is me" just sounds kind of weird.)  Don't know if it's ungrammatical, per se, but definitely a bit unnatural.  The same goes, I think, for some other phrases that might come  up in conversation but not in formal writing.  "Who's there?" "It's the police!" sounds perfectly natural.  "Who's there?" "It is the police!" sounds stilted and odd.  Again, perhaps not strictly ungrammatical, but definitely unidiomatic.

But pitching a female adult voice to a child's voice should work, right?
At least I've got the feeling that they're doing it all the time.

Ah, didn't realize cat was a woman.

Hmm... might work, but I'm still not sure; after all, just raising the pitch of a man's voice doesn't necessarily sound like a boy, so I have my doubts that just raising the pitch of a woman's voice would sound like a girl.  Still, I guess there's no harm in trying.

Having finally gotten around to playing this (got stuck for a little while on the

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colored bulb sequence puzzle

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, but eventually managed to figure it out), I can now try to answer a question you posed on the first page...

Ascovel and I debated how people would think of Jack in the end: to you, is he merely a comic figure? a pathetic figure?  A tragic one?  A hero?  A victim, or a villain?  I'm interested in hearing how players perceived him in the end -did we get it right?  Let us know!

Hmm...  I think my impression overall is that he's sort of a pathetic and tragic figure... but I think there may still be something (or several somethings) I'm missing.  But a deeper analysis requires getting into some spoilers, so...

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Okay, so, at first I thought at the end of the game that the whole murder plot was in Jack's imagination... but then there came the coda with everyone (except Jack) eating the salt and dying.  Right after which it repeated the intro (which by then I'd forgotten) establishing that in fact there were bodies found at the bar... so apparently this part wasn't Jack's imagination.  So it seems the salt was poisoned... which means the murder plot was real, but in attempting to save the husband's life Jack was inadvertently indirectly responsible for the deaths of Bob and a number of bar patrons instead.  Though some of the fault here may have been Bob's, for convincing Jack that it wasn't real and that he wasn't really saving anyone; if not for that, Jack may have taken the threat of the poisoned salt more seriously and gotten rid of it before anyone ate it.  (Then again, given that he's not exactly a pinnacle of responsibility, maybe not...)  Hence the patheticness... not only can he not tell his delusions from reality, but when he actually does try to do the right thing it ends up going horribly wrong... as well as the tragedy.

As for his seeing the couple at the end as his own mother and father... I'm pretty sure that was just his hallucination again.  The couple really were as he saw them at first.  Even how he initially saw the husband didn't look like how the husband looked on the other end of the phone call, and was probably part of the hallucination... maybe he was at first seeing the husband as a younger version of his father, but didn't recognize him until he saw him as his father as he is now.

But, as I said, there still seemed to be something I'm missing... I thought I'd figured out how it all fit together, until I reread this thread, now that I'd finished the game and didn't have to worry about spoilers, and I saw this post, which raised a good question... which you replied to, but without fully clearing up the question it raised.  So... I'm still not sure about the answer to that myself.  What I now think may be the case... but I'm still not sure... is that it wasn't that the mother killed the father, but that the father killed the mother (which is, after all, what it looked like was going to happen in the first place).  Sure, the figure behind the door said (s)he was Jack's mother, but obviously Jack's memories of the event aren't completely veridical, and certainly he'd be able to tell his parents' voices apart.

Still, even if that's true, it raises a couple of other questions.  Why, in the vision, does the figure claim to be Jack's mother?  And what is Jack's own culpability in this; why does the moose refer to his negligence?  For the first question... ah, I had a tentative explanation, but I just thought of a much better one.  In the case of the couple he's currently dealing with, the wife is plotting against the husband; therefore in his distorted recollection of his own family tragedy, Jack switches the genders to match them to this situation.  (After all, he does in the hallucination in the end equate the couple to his own parents.)  As for the second question... well, it could be that something Jack did enraged his father and precipitated his violence; the fault wouldn't really be Jack's, then, but as a child he could easily have seen it that way and exaggerated his own guilt.  For what he did, the possibility most hinted at in his vision is that he perhaps (accidentally?) burned his father's "precious collection of fishing magazines"... he does remark afterward that that might be why his father is so angry; he doesn't say he's responsible for their burning, but it could fit with the moose's remark about his negligence.  Though it might also have something to do with the birds?  Actually, though, the fishing magazine thing could even fit in with why the fish appears as Jack's bad conscience... he associates the fish with his father, who would, given his crime, certainly be considered "bad"... yet Jack doesn't really want to acknowledge the crime and still feels for his father, which is why he's so reluctant to give the bad conscience up.  (Why a moose for the good conscience, then?  Well, maybe just because that was another trophy that happened to be handy (the fish started as a trophy on the wall, after all), so it made for a good match.)

So, anyway, I dunno; that's my take on what really happened and how all the pieces fit together, but I could easily be wrong.

Hm, one thing i'm still not sure of, though; one detail I haven't quite fit in yet: Jack asks Bob how he knew his father's number, and Bob says that's for Jack to figure out.  Which seems to imply there's some significance to the fact that Bob knew Jack's father's number... but I'm not sure what the significance is.  Unless... and here this is just a total wild guess, and by far the most speculative part of my interpretation (well, okay, it's all pretty darn speculative)... Bob knew Jack's father, and was in on the murder somehow, or at least helped Jack's father cover it up; this may even extend to Bob actively trying to keep Jack a useless drunk so he won't be in a position to try to bring his father to justice.  In that case, Bob's death at the end might be a bit of poetic justice, though not so the deaths of the other bar patrons, I suppose...

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Phew.  Don't know how much of that, if any, is remotely close to what you had in mind, but that's the best I can make of it, anyway.

Oh, and Fitz...

Or the name of the doll. I thought it signified the piano keys - since both words are codewords for letters in military jargon.

Oh, I'm pretty sure the name of the doll does refer to something...

Okay I got it. And I tried to use the monsters voice on the tape recorder to scare the owl on the gravestone like you said but he just says "Hmm I'm not sure?".

Who says "Hmm I'm not sure?" and how are you trying to use it?

[hint]Are you using the tape recorder on the owl?  Try using it on the grave instead.[/hint]

Audacity has a nifty voice pitch tool I'm pretty sure that this will create convincing girl voices.

Unfortunately, it almost certainly won't.  There's more to it than pitch.  Having tried to create female-sounding voices for some projects of my own, I've dabbled with this myself, and it turns out (both from what I've read on the subject and from my own experience) that just shifting the pitch isn't enough to make a female voice that sounds remotely realistic.  You may also have to play around with something called formants.  Without tweaking the formants separately, just shifting pitch up may make you sound more like one of the Chipmunks than like a girl or a woman (and, conversely, shifting the pitch down may make you sound like you're underwater).

I found a thread here that dealt with trying to change a male to female voice in Audacity... maybe it will be of some help.  (I haven't tried using Audacity for this myself... the attempts I made were with a commercial program called ProTools (which does have the option to change the formants separately), and even with that I met with rather limited success...)

Huh... I thought I'd played all the RoN games (well, except for some of the most recent ones that came out since I played through them all and that I haven't gotten to yet), but I'd never even heard of this one...

How do I get past Bub and Bob? I tried the "Spencer Family" key but that didn't work.

You do need the key... but you need it to get something else.

Uncover one hint at a time until you're no longer stuck:

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Have you seen any reference to the "Spencer Family" before?

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Maybe somewhere in the graveyard?

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Go west from the initial graveyard scene and you'll see the Spencer Family Crypt.

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Use the key on the door to the crypt and go in.

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Once inside, interact with the coffin (if I remember right).  You should get a ring.

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Go back to the gate, and put the ring in the hole in the right gatepost.

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Whoops!  OK, left a longer time to vote than I'd intended, I guess... had a commitment yesterday that went far later than I expected.  Anyway, I guess it's time to tally the votes.

Oh, but first... uh, I said I'd cast a vote myself, and I still haven't done so.  Frankly, I agree with Sughly... there are so many good entries it's really hard to rank them and choose a top three.  I'm kind of tempted not to vote and just to add the votes of those who have.  But I said I'd vote, so I guess if I have to choose, I'll go with...

#1 - ProgZMax
#2 - Pinback
#3 - derrickfreeland

But again, it's very close; they were all good entries.  (And while they're all rather large, they're not so large that they couldn't work as in-game sprites... I could see all of these animated and appearing in a game.)

OK, now to tally the votes:

All right, in seventh place, the Wooden Hydra Trophy goes to Culun_dog, for his cute little turtle that may have trouble deciding which way to do...

In sixth place, the EGA Hydra Trophy goes to derrickfreeland, for his ominous two-headed raven...

In fifth place, the Bone Hydra Trophy goes to GreenBoy, for his triple-torsoed terror...

In fourth place, the Jade Hydra Trophy goes to loominous, for his adorable stripy aquatic creature...

In third place, the Bronze Hydra Trophy goes to Mad, for his portrayal of... the A-Borg, shall we say?...

In second place, the Silver Hydra Trophy goes to Pinback, for his interesting two-headed robot...

And finally, the Golden Hydra Trophy goes to ProgZMax, for his superbly done three-headed Giant Knight!

Here are the trophies, in descending order from Golden to Wooden... sorry if they may not look quite as nice as some trophies from other jams in the past; pixel art's not really my forte, but I did my best:



Congratulations to ProgZMax... and to all other entrants for creating so many great sprites!

I'd still say it's a matter of emphasis.

But, again, that doesn't work in all cases.  It's certainly not a matter of emphasis in the "whatever it is in English" example.

I think what we have here is two different meanings of "is". When "is" has the purpose of identifying or defining something, rather than just classifying or pointing something out, or taking an auxiliary function, it somehow takes a deeper, more universal meaning and is thus not contracted.

Again, how does that work with "whatever it is in English"?  Is it "identifying or defining something" there?  Or, for that matter, in "What's that?"  "It is a whale", it is identifying or defining something, but it can be contracted -- "What's that?" "It's a whale." is perfectly natural and grammatical... much more natural than "It is a whale", in fact.

"The bike's in the garage" and "a bike is a two-wheeled vehicle". The former statement is answering the question "where is it?" whereas the latter is answering the question "what is it?" a question of definition. I'm not saying this sentence would be ungrammatical if contracted, but my guess is that most people would say it with "is" standing alone.

Not really.  "A bike's a two-wheeled vehicle" sounds perfectly natural to me.  Granted, you wouldn't see it contracted in a dictionary definition, but in everyday speech there's nothing unusual about that sentence.

"If that's what I think it is..." In this sentence, the 2nd is has a defining function. It could never be contracted.

But in "I think it is a whale," the "is" also has a defining function, but can be (and generally would be) contracted: "I think it's a whale."

Again, still seems to me that it's OK to contract "it is" only when the complement is after the "it is", and not okay when the complement comes before the "it is" or is elided.  Still haven't seen any counterexamples to that, and it doesn't rely on fuzzy notions of what function a word is serving in a sentence.  Of course, it's hard to analyze because native speakers don't really consciously think about why it's okay in some circumstances and not in others, but that still seems to me the most workable rule I've seen for it so far.

For a further example, consider the following exchange:

"Is that a shark?"
"No... looks like a whale to me."
"Ah, yes.  A whale it is."

That last sentence has exactly the same words, fulfilling exactly the same functions, as "It is a whale" -- just in a different order.  But while "It is a whale" would usually be contracted in everyday speech to "It's a whale", you'd never contract it that last sentence to "A whale it's" -- that sounds horribly unnatural.

Though you did bring up one case that does throw a slight curve to that idea, the clause "whatever it's called in Swedish".  The complement is "called whatever in Swedish", but, although the "called" appears after the "it is", the "whatever" appears before.  Still think this fits the rule, though, because, even though the complement is split up and part put before the "it is" and part after, the head of the phrase is "called", which comes after the "it is".  It makes sense that if part of the complement is before the "it is" and part afterward, it's where the head of the complement is that matters.

I'm also curious if there are sentences where "it's" is grammatical but "it is" isn't.

I'm almost positive there aren't.  After all, in formal writing, contractions are often avoided altogether, and it doesn't make sense that formal writing would be less grammatical.  There are some sentences where "it is" would sound stilted and grammatical in speech, but it would still be correct in formal writing.  Well, here's an example: "Who's there?" "It's me!"  I think it would be very rare to say "It is me!"  (Of course, technically the complement should be in the subjective case, and it should be "It is I!", but that's opening a different can of worms that's already been covered and probably isn't worth bringing up again... and anyway, almost nobody says that.  Although, come to think of it, "It is I!" still seems more natural than either "It is me!" or "It's I!"  I guess because the formal register matches...)

I don't know that your last picture is really much "more cartoony" than the rest; they're all pretty cartoony.  But I definitely don't mean that as a bad thing; I really like this art style, and I'd love to see a game in this style.  Don't really have any criticisms; all the pictures look great, and there's nothing that really jumps out at me (aside from the minor issues in the walk cycle that you've already mentioned you're aware of).  I guess if I were going to be really nitpicky, I don't know that the angle of the woman in the second picture matches the angle of the background (it looks like we're looking up at the trees, but at the woman more or less head on), and I think the knees in the walk cycle may be too low (though I'm not positive; I'd have to freeze-frame it to be sure).  Oh, and maybe the fingers on the interlocked hands in the "Any Questions" picture look a little stubby.  But meh; like I said, those are just very tiny nitpicks.  Overall, looks great to me.  A very distinctive, attractive style that isn't obviously derivative of the style of any well-known artist.

OK, probably everyone who was going to vote has voted, but just in case I'll leave it a few more hours.  (loominous was probably right about this being too long a voting period, though... next time, if there is a next time, I'll know better.)  So, later tonight... trophies!

Looks very cool and all, but why can't the naked and the ninja be one and the same!? 

That's been done.

Maybe when the emphasis lies on the "is", you don't contract?

Hm... also true -- in "I was wrong!  It is the police!" you wouldn't contract that to "I was wrong!  It's the police!"  But I'd be inclined to regard that as a separate, additional rule rather than as a replacement for the rule I stated.  After all, in "whatever it is in English", the emphasis isn't on the "is", so this doesn't apply.

EDIT: Meh, the police example is a bad example here, because there's nothing really wrong or ungrammatical about the second version; it's just a matter of what you want to emphasize.  If you want to emphasize one of the words, it makes sense not to contract them -- which I suppose holds for contractions in general.  But I don't think that's the only thing that prevents contractions, and in particular I don't think that explains the "whatever it is in English" example, since the "is" isn't emphasized there.  Still leaning toward my "only contracts if the complement comes after the 'it is'" rule for now...

How can I complete the potion to follow the gnome?

This was another puzzle that was pretty much just a guessing game... there aren't really any clues.  I happened to guess right on my first try, but it was still just a guess.  But anyway, uncover one hint at a time until you're no longer stuck:

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Are you carrying anything that you haven't used yet that seems like it could be an ingredient in a potion?

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Something poisonous, perhaps?

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Use the toadstool on the potion.

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If you don't have the toadstool, you can get it from one of the first rooms.  I don't remember exactly which room it was in (and don't feel like replaying the game right now to find out), but it was definitely on the left side of the bridge.  Pretty sure it was either the barn room, or the room just south of that, though it's possible it was one room farther.  Yes, it's a bit annoying because there are so many rocks and bushes and toadstools that you can't do anything with and it just happens there's this one toadstool you do need, but... well, I guess that's just the way it is.

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