Andromeda Apocalypse - Extended Edition — 72 of 97

Part 6 - The Afterwords

Table of Final Question Options (continued)

[This is the afterwords rule:

say "I was in my car, early summer of 2011, driving my wife to our mountain resort, when I started teasing her with some scientific trivia about the galaxy of Andromeda. Kid was in the backseat, already dozed off, the sun did shine and the birds were singing. I begun flapping my never-stopping mouth about distances, dimensions, the sheer number of stars involved, when she begun yawning. I got the message and shut up.[paragraph break]But didn't shut up on the [italic type]inside[roman type].[paragraph break]That is how my first IF story had birth. I run to the house, turned on my Macbook Air (freshly acquired, and just a week before the release of the new one, ouch) and begun coding again, never fully realizing I was going to complete the task, for the first time ever.[paragraph break]I've first played and then tried to write IF in the mid-Eighties. I was nearly a teen, the world was splendid and everything quite worked for the best. The amount of time I could devote to my hobbies was impressive. [italic type]The Hobbit[roman type] was always running and I was struggling a lot trying to understand english and what to do with that singing bastard Thorin the dwarf. More that a quarter of century has passed, and I'm still here, messing with trolls and an english parser. Meanwhile, almost ten -- or twenty, who can tell? -- adventure games have danced on my screen waiting to be designed and coded. I never got much beyond the few introductory rooms.";

say "The occasion came when I stumbled upon the [italic type]IFComp[roman type]. Edition 2011 was about to open and I had a game halfway to being finished that could maybe, and just maybe, fit in. All I had to do was deciding how the world of Monarch was going to be saved and how I could code that damn soap-over-metal puzzle.[paragraph break]Summer passed by in a whoosh, and by the end of September the game was ready.[paragraph break]Or so I thought.[paragraph break]---[paragraph break]Coding a kind of game which is by far the most similar thing to a novel that could exist in a language that is not one's own is a rather terrific experience. Although I'm quite fluent in English and have classes listening to me from all around the globe -- I'm a graphic designer and expert on editorial design, which I teach in what you'd call a Master School for Gifted Youngsters -- I soon discovered that the river which spans between the speech and the writing is a very wide and turbulent one. Fortunately, my first proofreaders did an awesome job in putting straight my bulky texts (yeah: if you'd seen [italic type]Andromeda[roman type] before their intervention, you'd think this one was, like, Hemingway).";

say "So, I entered the Comp. For one and a half months, I've been in awe. I don't think I was exactly [italic type]aware[roman type] about what I've stepped into. I'm willing to believe that, if I'd known, I'd rather go around naked downtown than publish a game in so a renowned competition.[paragraph break]And that was nice, [']cause I had the opportunity, otherwise precluded, to step into a new, fascinating world. I had an audience. I had critics. I had a [italic type]chance[roman type].[paragraph break]I wanted to be a writer all my life. Since when ten years old, I filled notebooks with short tales and novels-wannabe. I actually did write a novel, one that is trying to find a place in the horrible italian fiction maelstrom, but I never had someone other than my wife or friends read anything that's mine. Now it seems, looking at the number in the online transcript of the first release of this game, more than 600 people have tried my game. On IFDB (at the time this is being written), [italic type]Andromeda[roman type] averages on 3 stars, with the German scene gifting me with 4.";

say "I don't really know how this second release will fare, out there. What I know is that one of my strongest desires, the one I keep asking the sky to make real whenever I see a falling star, has become solid truth. And that's more than what one would sell his soul to hell for, believe me.[paragraph break]Now, only time will tell if I will be a writer or have to stick with graphics. But if I die tomorrow, at least I won't go away saying 'nobody has ever read my work'. Thank you all who participated. This was a blast.[paragraph break]--Marco Innocenti, Firenze (Italy), January 8, 2012.".]

This is the achievements rule:

say "[Achievements_list]".

[This is the ancestors rule:

say "This game was not intended as a maniacally perfect scientific resource for space travel. That said, the author put so much effort in trying to make everything realistic. Apart from the obvious things that couldn't be (i.e. a train falling for a kilometer doesn't only crumple: it disintegrates) there is one which stood hidden until much too late.[paragraph break]The [']beacon['] has been pulled through space by the Hyerotropes. They made it fly at 6k times light-speed. If that's so... what about the humans? How could the First Colonists reach Andromeda WITHOUT such power and knowledge?[paragraph break]Well, they couldn't.[paragraph break]Given there is no Earth date in the game, one could argue that the voyage took a really huge amount of time and that the Colony indeed reached through space around -- what do you think? 10.000 a.D.? 100.000? Well, nope: Andromeda is 2.5 MILLIONS lightyears from Earth. At the speeds we can reach nowadays, the trip would have lasted around 90 BILLIONS years.[paragraph break]The one solution can be the use of a wormhole, a rip in the fabrics of reality that creates a passage to distant places... but we all know that would have been a deus ex machina. That's why it is not mentioned ingame.".]