A lot of wildly different strands of thought went into the design of
the Atrocitron.

I had encountered some players who were nostalgic for the way old
games would become intentionally unwinnable and the way that (to them)
said games would try to hide this fact.

I am, to put it mildly, not a fan of this mode of design, but I *am* a
fan of games that demand something unusual of the player and go out of
their way to make sure that nothing else gets in the way of that
demand. I thus set out the conditions I put in the ABOUT text as the
most unfair possible set of Zarfian cruelty conditions, and then set
about designing a puzzle that would meet those criteria while still
playing completely fair with the player.

It was, in short, an adversarial work that served as a
proof-of-concept of a piece of game design, possibly as part of a
larger argument. That was when I decided to name it the Atrocitron:
the Annoyotron series has had several authors produce entries in it
and all of them fit that standard. (The first two satirize narrators
that force the player character to take unwise actions; the third is
an example of playing fair while being unfair; the fourth is an
argument against the feasibility of automatic game-solving
heuristics.)

The rest of the design sensibility was inspired by games like
"Cheater" and "Hard Puzzle", and I also got to refine that sensibility
a bit when discussing the design of "Map" after the IFComp it was
entered into. Once I started working with that, though, the project
was greatly delayed, becuase I realized that I was making not a
cynical prank game, but rather a puzzle hunt artifact. That demanded a
bit more polish and complete implementation of the puzzle.

So, here we are, at the end of a prank turned serious. If you want to
claim to have mastered the Atrocitron, you should know all 15 actions
that increase your environmental impact, and what impact each of those
actions provides.

If you dump or disassemble the binary, you wouldn't have found the
decryption key inside it, nor would you have found any of the victory
message after the screen clears. I obfuscated that text using a custom
pseudo-random number generator that relied on an algorithm I'd never
before seen. It was first described by Brad Forschinger at
http://b2d-f9r.blogspot.com/2010/08/16-bit-xorshift-rng-now-with-more.html
and it was based on Marsaglia's results at
http://www.jstatsoft.org/v08/i14/paper. It turned out to translate
fairly readily to Inform.

I'm glad someone made it far enough to read this. Thank you for playing!

  --Michael Martin