Version 25

Uploaded release 25 of Alabaster, after working through some more beta transcripts. The most notable changes were

• systematically added handling of “maybe” and “I don’t know” as responses to most yes/no questions; sometimes “maybe” moves the conversation forward, sometimes it doesn’t, but it should now always be recognized as a reply.
• went through and made sure this time that quips starting with “if” also recognize “whether”. (I know, I thought I had already done that, but apparently not. Probably I need to set up some systematic way of testing synonyms in quip names.)
• fixed a stupid error that prevented some quips from being recognized under some circumstances, and particularly messed up elegant responses to the riddle. (They were recognized if phrased with ‘ask about…’ but not if the answers were phrased as ‘guess blood’ or ‘suggest blood’, which are more elegant possibilities really.)

Testers report that even the fairly advanced endings are not hard to reach. This doesn’t bother me especially, as I had never envisioned the game as being all that hard.

Meanwhile, OmniGraffle is completely choking on the .dot file now — I think it has just gotten too long — so I haven’t generated an up-to-date conversation graph. This is vexing. Good thing that the project is nearly done.