Honey for Aponuo by Frank Gevaerts
Honey for Aponuo is a text adventure, written in inform7.
It’s playable on the web. If you play a lot of interactive fiction you might have your favourite interpreter, in which case you can download the gblorb file.
There is no graphics or audio in this game, so I opted out of those categories.
The biggest difference with my LD42 game (apart from the actual game itself of course) is that this time there's a built-in help system.

| HTML5 (web) | http://www.gevaerts.be/ld43/Release/play.html |
| Source code | http://www.gevaerts.be/ld43/Release/source.html |
| Other (web) | http://www.gevaerts.be/ld43/Release/Honey%20for%20Aponuo.gblorb |
| Other (document) | http://www.gevaerts.be/ld43/Release/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/honey-for-aponuo |
Ratings
| Overall | 371th | 3.065⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 310th | 3.083⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 422th | 2.636⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 446th | 2.705⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 265th | 2.674⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 353th | 2.848⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 25🗳️ | 15🗨️ |
I got to open the beehive but that damn bear is always catching me. I'll give it another try tomorrow when I'm more awake.
Nice job on the narrative, is captivating.
Congrats on the entry!
@djn did you try typing help or hint? There are some hints about the boots there
@incobalt yes, for some reason last time I ended up with more stuff to do even though this time I spent more time on it. I just couldn't come up with proper puzzles. I think what I need is ld42's inspiration and ld43's sleep schedule :)
I wasn't entirely convinced that being able to die was a good thing, but then I figured you could really only die fairly near the start of the game, and in most cases undo would save you, so using undo is certainly something I expected people to do.
I wish I'd thought of eating the honeycomb to spite Aponuo!
The bear ended up being pretty frustrating to deal with, because I would take meta-game actions (Like listing my inventory), or try to take an action which was not allowed by the parser ("break beehive"), which allowed the bear to catch up to me and eat me. I'd suggest only progressing the bear when "real" actions are taken, as opposed to moving it with every command entered.
I was also a bit stumped on the beehive until going into the help menu - It was strange that "break"ing the beehive was parsed correctly (But not allowed), but "open"ing it was the correct answer - I wouldn't normally think of beehives as something that one opens up without breaking them. Likewise, the fact that I had to drop the honeycomb, when "give honeycomb to bear" was correctly parsed (But refused) was frustrating, as it felt like an unfair death.
Because the game parsed these commands properly and had a unique response for them (but chastised me and disallowed them) implied that taking those courses of action were incorrect. Because these weren't parser errors, it was as though the game was telling me "I understand what you want to do, but you cannot/should not do it", so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the correct solutions, before going to the help menu and discovering that I just needed a different verb.
Yes, meta-actions should be skipped by the bear (not just for the hunger thing, also for moves). I knew that when I was implementing it, and I should have spent more time on figuring out how to do it properly.
The beehive - well, I guess I was mostly thinking modern man-made ones that you can open and take the honeycombs out of, while I guess you were thinking of either natural ones or less advanced ones, which is probably more fitting for the game. Next time...
The giving food to the bear response is one I specifically wrote. Maybe it should have been a bit more detailed and had a hint about dropping it instead (or maybe I should just have allowed giving it directly...)
Didn't guess a couple of verbs, so _help_ section was pretty handy. As a linux terminal nerd I appreciate games like _Kill the Wumpus_ or this one. Found myself bashing Tab for auto-complete and OF COURSE I hit Ctrl-W a couple of times. XD Great game!
Maybe you could have downloaded the game file and run it with a standalone interpreter for better ctrl-w proofing! :)
Did you figure it out in the end? Did you try the help?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTeUPXVSPps