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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

Very nice! I like the RNG puzzle you started off with. This reminds me of the Python Challenge, but inspired more by HAKMEM than by exercising random Python library code.

A couple of minor issues I tripped over due to experience with other text adventures:

- Consider adding the standard text adventure shortcut commands: "x" or "examine" for "look at", and "i" for "inventory".

- I found it surprising that "look at inventory_item" didn't work. "look at boat" or "look at vest", for instance.

- How about "help command" for each command listed in the "help" output?

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Deploying these fixes now - thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for the rapid response! All of those changes work perfectly here, and the interface feels much more comfortable now.

I kinda expected "x chips" and "x radionuclides" to do something, at least as a joke. (Out of curiosity, did you get some inspiration from "no tea" there?)

Also, how about "x me", "talk to me", and "help help"?

Any way you could provide scrollback?

Added those now as well! (and, yes, that and as a complement to the fission verb)

Do you mean scrollback across refreshes or something else? (you can email me at robbyw@cueup.com since HN will start time-limiting our conversation at this depth)

> Added those now as well! (and, yes, that and as a complement to the fission verb)

Thanks! Most of them seem to work, except for "talk to me" and "help help".

> Do you mean scrollback across refreshes or something else?

No, I meant scrollback within a single session. I'd like to scroll back through the log of my interaction with the game, all the way back to the logo and preamble.

The bit about "Absolutely no uranium, plutonium, thorium, or radionuclides derived therefrom" was actually not inspired by the "No tea" inventory item in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It should have been. I wrote that part, and I've played THHGTTG, but there was no causal relationship between these two events. I put in that inventory item because there was a "fission" verb, and I wanted to be explicit about the fact that you do not have any critical masses of fissile elements anywhere on your person, nor any elements from which you can breed fissile isotopes using some spare neutrons.

(I probably would have made the radionuclides examinable, if I hadn't been too busy making all the verbs apply to pigs. There's probably a lesson in here somewhere.)

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