Ask Ryan

On 19 February 2022, on the Intfiction forum, Ryan Veeder began a topic entitled Ask Ryan with the words:

Do you have any questions—especially questions for me, specifically? I would be happy to answer them. I want to make myself available to anyone who has questions.

Here is the theme music for this service.

This page is an index to the subsequent oracular statements.

Questioner	Question	Answer
Grueslayer	The first three questions ever, including a question about Inform 6	Answers, including "I don’t know anything about Inform 6."
Hanon Ondricek	Three more questions, including "Why are you so cool?"	Three more answers, including "I’m afraid I don’t know why you find me to be so cool."
Dan Fabulich	Several questions, including asking for advice to new authors	Several answers MY ADVICE TO NEWBIES WHO WANT TO TRY THEIR HAND AT WRITING INTERACTIVE FICTION HOW OR WHY I GOT INVOLVED IN INTERACTIVE FICTION HOW OR WHY I WAS ABLE TO WIN MY FIRST IFCOMP HOW PATREON IS GOING
Tobias V. Langhoff	More questions, mainly about specific games	More answers ON “THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO KOHOLINT” ON “RYAN VEEDER’S MUD WARRIORS” ON WHETHER I KNOW OF BITSY AND MY TAKE ON THAT CONTROVERSIAL TOPIC ON HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
P.B. Parjeter	Are you Canadian?	I live in Iowa
bg	Meta question	Meta answer
Henrik Åsman	Status of Craverly Heights	Seems like the kind of thing that will never go away
P.B. Parjeter	Question about camera implementation in Robin and Orchid	Emily Boegheim did all the work
severedhand	Technical question about Cragne Manor	I don't remember
ausgerechnet	What was the inspiration for Castle Balderstone?	A book I wrote called ‘MOTORCYCLUS’ and Other Extremely Scary Stories.
Dannii	What should we know about Nautilisia that we probably don’t?	It's secretly “based on” a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr
Magnus4444	Multiple questions	Multiple answers 1. Was ‘You’ve…’ your first ever game? Or did you have a play around a few times before you hit your stride with that one? 2. What’s your process like for creating a game? Do you tend to map out the locations and plot first or do you start with a particular kind of interaction you’re interested in? Is it different on different games? 3. Does the implementation form a big part of that? So, are there things that you rule out as being a headache relative to the pay off for the player and so on? 4. Wrenlaw is quite different in tone and experience from the other three - was that more autobiographical as a piece? 5.1. What parts of your games have you been proudest of? 5.2. Are there any parts of implementing them that really drove you nuts at the time? 5.3. Which games of yours should I play next? 6. What are a few games of other authors that you’ve really admired and why? 7. My son (12) is quite into computer games so I’m keen to get him into IF - he’s asked me to make him a game featuring the SCP Foundation - any tips for a first time coder?!
Robb Sherwin	Comment masquerading as a question
Nathan	Are The Ascent of the Gothic Tower versions different?	They should be the same.
Nobody		Unsolicited link to video of presentation at USCHaCCSE-LitRG
Jason Love	Your socks are gorgeous so how does one become funnier?	Start from first principles
Pinkunz	Question about player agency	Answer about discovery, and not being able to see the limitations of the world
Magnus4444	Questions about Ryan Veeder's Authentic Fly Fishing	Answers 1. As an author, can you keep adding to the game? So, could you add extra episodes / areas etc and then just recompile the game? 2. Roughly how many badges are there? 3. How do the time sensitive features work? Is there an amount of time IRL that a player has to keep coming back before certain events trigger?
Magnus4444	Follow-up questions	Follow-up answers Would clearing the cache on my browser affect this? Do you get data on when and where the players are playing from? Have any other games followed this route of having different days / different events linked to real world data etc? This seems a great way to create more of a live event around a game - for example, a game that had to be played over a week with different stages unlocking each day…
Pinkunz	Implied questions	Answers to questions inferred using ", am I right?" One of the reasons you’re experimenting with unannounced date-locked content is to foil efforts at strip-mining a game of all its endings, collectibles, and Easter eggs, right? The exclusive hosting of both Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing and Ryan Veeder’s Bram Stoker’s The Dracula Files , beyond driving traffic to your website and preventing the proliferation of disparate versions of the same game, helps discourage folks from decompiling the game, right? You could update an online-only game to render people’s walkthroughs incomplete, right?
David Welbourn	Post about walkthroughs	I always enjoy reading David’s walkthroughs for my games
David Welbourn	Question about Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing
Jason Love	Questions about planners and Winter Storm Draco	Answers ON THE SUBJECT OF PLANNERS ON THE SUBJECT OF THAT COMBAT SYSTEM
Pinkunz	How do you maintain your mental health while remaining productive?	I work on things that make me happy. Detailed design preserves us from miseries such as writer's block and assists in maintaining motivation.
Pinkunz	Releasing games within or without competitions	I guess in general I don’t find competitions very motivating
Mathbrush	What was the main driving concept behind Little Match Girl?	Originally the bizarreness of the story and now the opportunity to build these games into a story on the scale of Venture Bros. or Sandman or Adventure Time
Pinkunz	What significance does the screenname Afterward have?	It's just rad, being an adverb
BrettW	Do you have any advice on reading and processing reviews of your work?	Detailed answer under the headings (1) Know Your Goals and (2) Ryan Whines
Magnus4444	Are there any plans to make any more episodes of Clash of the Type Ins?	Maybe
Nathan	Do you ever plan to release updated versions of your games?	In general, on principle, most of the time, no
Pinkunz	(1) Question about hosting Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing; (2) Will there be a third Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction?	(1) Potentially depressing, but very nice, statistics; (2) The wheels are not moving as fast as I'd like
gfaregan	What fantasy books do you like and are influenced by (especially A Rope of Chalk)	A (spoiler marked) list of fantasy influences
Ben Kirwin	(1) Is The Little Match Girl 4 your first time using Vorple? (2) What about the game inspired you to use it? (3) Is it nice? (4) Any advice or experience to share for future authors?	(1) I first used Vorple for Even Some More Tales from Castle Balderstone; (2) I wanted to some cinematic presentation elements to an otherwise fairly standard parser experience; (3) Vorple can do way more than I’ve done with it; (4) Vorple opens the door for you to let a parser game do anything that you’d expect a website to be able to do. (A series of posts with rudimentary and intermediate Vorple examples follow.)
Pinkunz	With Neapolitan Ice cream, what are your preferences?	I don’t especially want to eat chocolate-and-vanilla-and-strawberry ice cream, but I feel like if I did, I would ask for a scoop of just vanilla, or just chocolate
Peter Wiehe	is there a technical mechanism in one of your games you find interesting to talk about?	Yes. (Links to annoted source code for several games, as well as blog posts about the methods of autosaving in Ryan Veeder's Authentic Fly Fishing, follow.)
JTN	Ryan, did you ever escape… Mystery of Cave Maze…	It looks like I never did escape… Mystery of Cave Maze. As far as I know, only a couple of people have solved the Mystery of Cave Maze. There are also mysteries that few if any people have solved in club wooby, A Rope of Chalk and Even Some More Tales from Castle Balderstone.
Dan Fabulich	Would you consider adding EXITS support to future games?	I am considering it.
Dan Fabulich	A spoiler question about the intention behind a specific puzzle in The Little Match Girl at the Battle of Gray Peaks and what it says about the intentions behind the game	Unanswered