I’ve just made a new release of “Aunts and Butlers” for its tenth anniversary year (because I’ve just noticed that’s what year it is, so why not.) It’s a Wodehousean adventure that came mid-table in the 2006 IFComp and was a finalist for two Xyzzies.
The new release includes artwork for all NPCs (which shows when you LOOK AT them), a new hints page, a few bugfixes, and some engine improvements including a move of the save/restore system from cookies to HTML5 local storage (this makes it work offline in Chrome). If you have already-existing saved games in cookies, they’ll be moved to local storage when the page loads.
break urn
The urn shatters!
A sad-looking clump of ash rolls out of the wreckage.
Aunt Cedilla sighs impatiently under her breath.[/code]
I was rather fond of this little adventure. It was ridiculous and funny but the puzzles were of a decent level. I was able to solve most the things in my way with just a little bit of guessing and exploring. It’s intuitive, which is good.
Also, the front-end client you used to present the online-hosted game is great. The font and basic color scheme are really understated and enhanced the experience. The artwork displayed when looking at NPCs was a nice touch. I was rather amused by Aunt Cedilla’s picture, in particular.
As this was more important to players than I realised, it’s now available as an offline Windows executable. See versificator.net for the download link. As a bonus, you get a musical intro screen.
I did the same for “Portcullis” as well.
I’ll look into making offline versions for other systems too. (You can always download it as a zipfile and run it offline in your browser, although saved games don’t work in all systems this way.)
Hey, beautiful! Wonderful! Most excelent! It’s great to have the browser versions for maximum portability, but this is even better for Windows users! Cheers!
Can’t seem to be able to run it, though. Using Windoes 7 64 bits. It uses as 25% of the CPU, which is as much as any process is allowed at least in my system, and the process just hangs there.
Ah, that’s annoying, it’s worked on all the machines I’ve tried so far. Is that Aunts & Butlers, Portcullis, or both?
In the case of A&B, I realised last night that I’d accidentally included a bunch of large files (the original scans and Gimp files for the artwork) that didn’t need to be there, and taking them out brought the binary size down from about 20 Meg to about 4. Do you have the more recent one?
If it still doesn’t work, there are some other things I can try.
