itch.io's Summer Sale is on. Leadlight Gamma sale is on.

Leadlight Gamma desktop screenshot (click to enlarge)

itch.io's June 19 – June 26 Summer Sale is on now. If you're ready to try to apprehend a variety of games that make Steam's offerings look like the ultimate in white bread, take a gander at what's on itch's front page, then click the View All Games on Sale link. There are 708 as I type this. (Honestly, because there's no list view, and you have to scroll and scroll and scroll, it's not the best presentation. Come to think of it, I should make a suggestion to itch about this.)

Of course, as per my previous post, I'm here to remind you that the Leadlight Gamma + Bandcamp Soundtrack deal is part of itch's sale. You get the game plus the Bandcamp soundtrack for US$1.67, until the end of this week.

Leadlight Gamma ios screenshot (click to enlarge)

Plug 3 of 2: Leadlight Gamma + Bandcamp Soundtrack sale pending on itch.io, June 20-27

itch.io's summer sales loom, and thus so does my Leadlight Gamma + Bandcamp Soundtrack sale. (You can bookmark that link for when the sale period starts.)

Here is the deal. Between June 20 and June 27 (of 2018) on itch.io:

* You get 75% off text-adventure-survival horror-CRPG Leadlight Gamma
* You get a free coupon for the soundtrack on Bandcamp

So you get both items for US$1.67, which is a $10 saving or 85% off. (Regular minimum cost of the game (US$6.66) plus the Bandcamp soundtrack (US$5) = $11.66).

Leadlight Gamma is a substantial piece of Inform tech featuring a zoomable automap, an artwork gallery, a free-running soundtrack in an out-of-world player, and two layers of unlockables: one for when you first clear the game, and one for when you clear it with a perfect score. If you're playing on a PC, the game offers a thorough accessibility mode catering to screen-reading software. The game runs on MacOS – PCs (Windows, Linux) – iPads and iPhones (iOS) via iFrotz

Read / see much more about Leadlight Gamma (and the original Leadlight) on the game's homepage and its itch.io page

Plug 2 of 2 - Time Warp

Back in 2014, I put an easter egg inside Leadlight Gamma (By the way, don't buy that game right now, it'll be on sale in about a week). The easter egg consisted of a second game: Time Warp, a CYOA I programmed on the Apple II when I was eleven or twelve. I included it verbatim, complete with spelling mistakes and in its original all caps presentation:

Time Warp's thrilling title screen. There are more intrigues here than in the court of the Medicis.

Time Warp is a self-contained Inform 7 extension. That means you can hook it into it any other Inform game with almost no effort, and without affecting the code of that game. Going into Time Warp, staying there for any duration of play, and then leaving it, takes a single Inform turn. Or no turns if you know how to suppress the advance of time using the Variable Time Control extension or its ilk.

As far as I know, Time Warp is the only technically non-intrusive whole-game-in-one-extension out there so far.

Therefore my very serious proposal is this: If it suits you to do so, why not put Time Warp in YOUR next Inform 7 game?

Whether Time Warp turns out to be an actual feature of your game, appearing on a playable computer, console, arcade cabinet or tablet of the glowing future, or whether you bury access to it in some ridiculous nook or cranny, or whether you make its appearance conditional on the use of an especially unpopular command phrase – it's a whole game! And you could do much worse.

Let's face it, easter-egging XYZZY is pretty old hat these days, and you can't put Zork in your game without breaking a bunch of copyright laws. Plus it's probably really hard to put Zork inside your own game, just from a technical standpoint.

Personally I think it'd be great if Time Warp could become the Wilhelm Scream of Inform games.

If I can't convince you to brandish Time Warp, how about you make your own easter egg game, bottle it in an extension, and increase the inventory of this particular app space to two? That would be neat. In the meantime, consider Time Warp. After all, it considers you.

Where are the links to Time Warp, you ask? In the spirit of easter eggdom, I've made it so that to get to the Time Warp page from this one, you have to find the easter egg entity in this post and click on it.

Plug 1 of 2 - Captain Piedaterre's Blunders

As I mobilise myself to the idea of self-promotion for itch.io's annual summer sale (first traditional mental hurdle – it's not summer where I live, it's winter) I'm casting my eyes back over the last few IF things I've made. My assessment is that two of them have been under-patronised.

1. Captain Piedaterre's Blunders

This comic game is a CYOA spin-off I made from a popular game (Captain Verdaterre's Plunder by Ryan Veeder) by a popular author (... Ryan Veeder) that's been pronounced to be canonical by that author. Plus I drew the cover art on paper with my hands, and I'm pretty chuffed with that cover art. Alright, I coloured the art in the computer after scanning the paper, but I drew the black and white lines using my hands.

Piedaterre's is also a CYOA made with Inform, not most people's first engine of fancy when they think CYOA, and under the hood it's running an unnecessarily powerful (for this game) WIP extension of mine that lets you to play it by clicking links, or by pressing keys, or by using one method or the other method or a mixture of both methods. It's mixing the world model and choices, a la Andrew Plotkin's Unified Glulx Input. It was originally a demo module for my extension.

In spite of all this exciting provenance, the game's been rated three times on IFDB in total and reviewed zero times. The most recent rating was 1 out of 5.

I reckon this game's a good, if un-major, entertainment for folks who've played Plunder, therefore I encourage you to try it, especially if you've played Plunder.

* Here's the online playable version of Captain Piedaterre's Blunders
* Here's its IFDB page

I'll talk about the next thing of mine you've probably under-patronised in the next post.