IF Comp ’14 – Ade McT’s Fifteen Minutes!

I don’t know what to put in this space so I’m just going to link to a video my sister made about kale.  My sister gets really excited about kale, apparently!

[spoilers begin here]

I hope that I’m not supposed to be better at science than my character is, because this time machine is intimidating.

2:14 pm >x second me
Like looking in a mirror. Or, at least, a mirrored mirror.
Huh? (many hours later) Oh!  I get it, an unmirrored mirror would be backwards.  Duh.

I do like that the prompt has been changed to the time, making it easier to keep track and giving a sense of urgency to the proceedings.

Rule 1 for time travel: DO NOT try and communicate with yourself. It only leads (has led) (will have lead (?tense??check?)) to trouble.
It also, completely coincidentally, makes implementing NPCs a hell of a lot easier!  (I’m not judging, believe me.  I once made the player character wear a shock collar so I could administer electric retribution when they tried to do something I didn’t feel like implementing.)

Okay, I hit up the hints pretty hard and learned that the colored switches represent minutes in base 3.  This enabled me to get the machine working and I promptly died of paradox paralysis, I assume because I set the machine to an arbitrary twenty minutes instead of whatever number the game wanted me to use.  The hints suggest that I learn from what Second Me is doing, but Second Me’s actions are described as “commits different feats” or “undertakes some actions,” which is Really Not Helpful.

The puzzle of this game seems to be “use logic to figure out a particular series of actions, then do those in the correct order.”  This is probably fun for a particular subset of people, but personally, if I’m playing a time travel game, I want to be able to play around with time travel without having to worry about instadeath from setting the machine incorrectly.

How does that work, anyway?  I’m First Me, so I should get to do whatever I’m doing without worrying about a paradox, right?  Eh, fuck it, this is way too confusing.  I’m just going to go watch Primer again.