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V*C dies at the end

  • Hasvers
  • 11/16/2014 06:30 AM
  • 1887 views
Thanks in no small part to awesome reviewers and the kind gent who featured it on the front page, this game has been downloaded exactly 500 times. This is precisely the number of days required to notice Zooey Deschanel is not your ideal girlfriend, 200 more than the perfect amount of Greeks to defeat sexually ambiguous generals and their mutant Iranian rhinoceri, and 12 short of a round number (did I just steal a joke from xkcd? shame on me).

This feels to me like something to celebrate: my game has been played by enough people to constitute a Roman cohort. If the players of my game were to unite, we could, like, conquer a few towns in Gaul or something.
In this honor, I will release a patch where all numbers on screen are replaced by Latin numerals share a few thoughts with my awesome audience.

In the Kalevala, there's this guy called Ilmarinen. He is like the prototypical hacker: super smart, can build practically anything, but he kinda sucks at social skills, and romance especially. See how far back those stereotypes go? (actually that last part of his characterization seems largely due to a 19th century compiler*, so maybe not more than two centuries)

(* Not that sort of compiler, although that would be theme-appropriate. They didn't have compilers in the 19th century. They wrote everything in machine code.)

The thing is, contrary to Hephaestus and other similar divine geeks, Ilmarinen doesn't really work with a plan. He is the guy who made the actual sky, so he's kind of a big deal. But when it comes down to it, he pretty much just boots up his smithy, whacks away at things all night (in a Red Bull-induced frenzy, no doubt), goes to bed, and comes back in the morning to discover what the hell it was he just made.

As you could expect, the first few attempts are generally not it. As beautiful as they may be in their own right - a killing bow, a war vessel, a cow that leaks (don't ask me) - these things are actually terrible mistakes. Because you see, they are not what he was trying to make. And the guy knows better than to get attached: that magnificent gold and silver crossbow that can headshot noobs like nobody's business, he just throws it back into the fire, and starts working again.

Now, I am quite sure I had a moral in mind for this post, but I got sidetracked looking up the plural of rhinoceros, so I will leave it at that.

And, uh, thanks, guys (in the least gender-binary sense of the term).

Posts

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CashmereCat
Self-proclaimed Puzzle Snob
11638
I love your glorious diversions. Playing Exeunt Omnes, I was probably a bit more confused than most people on how to play, but I at least admire the innovation and tact required to create this game. Here's to another 500 downloads (or 499 as of this post).
Whoo-hoo! And that's only the traceable number. I'm sure you've had more with the contest download. Great work!
Haha thanks, and congrats to you Merlandese for the same with Last Word! Our download numbers here have almost always been within 5% of each other, and we arrived at the same time and had approximately the same external factors (reviews, front page presence and such), so I guess we've actually been performing a very reliable statistical sampling of the same niche among users of this site :P

Now while I'm glad for any degree of diffusion it can get, this post mainly reflects my surprise at Exeunt Omnes reaching 3 or 4 milliPoms (now an official unit), as it was very much an experiment - I guess somehow it got a lot of credit and clemency for at least trying something, and I'm very grateful for that.

I do intend to do better next time, though (and spoiler: "next time" has just begun and has a very tangential connection to some themes in the blog post)
On which topic: Cashmere, you're far from the only one who's been perplexed by the UI and presentation, so I will devote a lot of my effort to that specifically, in hope that the experience will be more organic in the future.
Merlandese, I hope that in the meantime you're advancing on the commercial version or sequel of LW, but since you haven't made an official announcement yet, I won't press you on these matters :P
NeverSilent
Got any Dexreth amulets?
6280
I finally got around to playing Exeunt Omnes, and though I still haven't been able to reach the secret ending yet (even with the walkthrough, what am I doing wrong?!), I'm very amazed at how brilliantly you managed to put the concept to practice. Like Cashmere, it admittedly also took me quite a while to get used to the somewhat clunky interface, and I stumbled upon some typos and a crash. But other than that, I really want to compliment you on both the clever idea as well as its execution in the game. You never cease to impress.
Thank you so much! Sorry about the crash, this has happened very randomly to people (and of course never to me) so I've never identified the source, but I will improve exception handling to prevent those freak happenings in the future.

As for the ending, I went through it again until I finally understood: there's very little randomness in this game but if the RNG really hates you, one more node is needed near the start, to the right. On the walkthrough page, you'll find an updated screenshot for Part 1and also a save file right before the ending.

All my apologies and with this, I am officially through wth any amount of randomness in my designs :P
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