Stowaway 1.0 J Freebase (j_freebase@yahoo.com) July 23, 2004 Thank you very much for giving my first completed game a try. Although I have many aborted TADS projects languishing on my hard drive (as well as a few works in progress), this was my first foray into ADRIFT, using unregistered ADRIFT 4.0. It is a very small game. This game was originally planned to participate in a mini-comp, and started in TADS3 before I realized that it would never meet the 50kb size restriction. I quickly ported the idea to ADRIFT, thinking that unregistered 4.0's limit of 25 Tasks and Objects would be sufficient. They weren't. I found that a lot of the things the basic library does for you in TADS you had to add as special Tasks in Adrift. Any conversation that changed the game state, and any object manipulation more complicated than TAKE, DROP, or EXAMINE had to be added as a Task, or (usually) multiple Tasks. The result is a game not entirely what I wanted it to be. Even if I had used free ADRIFT 3.9 or registered 4.0, I would have been struggling against the parser. It isn't ADRIFT's fault, it is my own because of my approach to game design. Enough excuses. Any remaining flaws in the game are likely not due to any lack of dilligence on the part of myself or my beta-testers (whom were wonderful, I'd like to thank Rob Loggie and A Ninny in particular), but rather the result of me being too damn cheap to upgrade to the registered version. If you need help with the game, check both the usenet newsgroup alt.games.xtrek and the Yahoo! group aifarchive. Don't bother writing to me for hints, but I will graciously accept compliments and criticizm.