How I rediscovered this old game and why I posted it, and what came of it

I sort of forgot I wrote this one, all the way back in April and May of 2012. I was just coming off writing some very short games for the Apollo 18 20th anniversary tribute which Kevin Jackson-Mead had put together, and though I really shoehorned some puzzles in,  it was fun exchanging ideas with all sorts of people, both new and old text adventure authors. I liked seeing the ideas they came up with--there was a lot of simple fun!

And it stirred a lot of ideas. Around this time I also started working at Shuffling Around, which was to become my IFComp 2012 entry, and it felt both big and organized, like I'd really made it.

There isn't as much programming oomph in Mrs Crabtree's third grade geography class, but I still think it's pretty fun (in fact, it should take less time) and I don't think you have to be a resident of the United States to play it, either. You may just need a map, and a bit of logical thinking.

The reason why I wrote it was to understand something specific in Inform 7, namely, how relations worked. I defined a reciprocal one called bordering. For instance, Illinois and Indiana border each other. I consulted a map.

This was originally submitted to playfic.com to get a bit more visibility, so it had restrictions. I think it had to be a z5 game. So I just got the bare-bones version out there. I was pleased with what I had written.

Still, I pulled the code on playfic locally, where I started poking around, and I eventually managed to make abbreviations and so forth work very well. (This wasn't possible on playfic!) Indiana had an obvious conflict, since IN was also going in. It taught me about hacks: "instead of going inside, try visiting Indiana;" "instead of going northeast, try visiting Nebraska;"

I had a lot of fun but really didn't feel like re-releasing it with much of a flourish, because I wasn't sure where. Yet I was reminded of it, every couple of years when someone would write about it. And say, hey, this was kind of neat. Which I think it is.

Mike Spivey, who wrote the wonderful games A Beauty Cold and Austere and Junior Arithmancer, was someone who mailed me, and he said he and his son had had a lot of fun tracing paths around the United States. This got me back to poking around, because they noticed some special cases, such as Tennessee and South Carolina not quite bordering. There was always something to add, whether it be states with Maritime boundaries and whether we should include them, or maybe Utah and New Mexico as opposing parts of the Four Corners.

Still, it always felt like an exercise, so I didn't really prioritize republishing it. That changed earlier this year, when again I had forgotten I had written it, but I was looking at all the games I had written, and their titles. I wanted to see how close I was to getting something for every letter of the alphabet. I "saw" that E, J, K, L, M and O were blank. Wait, you say, but Mrs Crabtree starts with M! Sure enough, it does. But the thing is, when I vetted all my games, I did so from my inform directory on windows, where I had listed the game as c:/games/inform/crabtree.inform. So I blew past it at first.

It wasn't until I had another look just in case to make sure I hadn't missed anything that I realized, indeed, Crabtree did not start with a C, and I just wrote that in there to abbreviate things, back before I felt okay with 25-character-long file names. I just didn't want to type them in. I'm able to flip around much more quickly with that files now.

So this caused a small shift. I had originally written a game for the Single Choice Jam (I used it as a way to cover all three letters--provided, of course, there was a baseline of quality) that started with M, and one with L and K.

The M-game was Magic Knight Tour, which was about forcing you into the right path through knight-move tour of a chess board. It's something tough to understand on its own, but on rails, it's a neat trick to know, and you can see how to modularize it. I also had two game ideas called Kid, Listen up and Just Try Harder, Kid! One was an adult you said "yes, okay" to, and another had "try harder" to click, maybe with a maze from the hub where you need to choose where to try harder next. But they seemed so similar! An adult yacking at you.

So I made plans to merge them into Just Listen Up, Kid! This stagnated once I understood the mechanics of timing early on. Plus it opened up something more fun for me to write: Earth IQWXZs Must Die! It's neat that without Mrs. Crabtree, I might not have written EIMD. I also had an idea for O, to complete the circuit, but that will wait until April 2024.

I'm reflections, even though Mrs Crabtree was a fully whimsical game, it's done more for me than I expected. First, I think it was a catalyst for writing a fun and natural puzzle. Then, it kicked me into gear to write something more fulfilling than my original lineup for the Single Choice Jam. I believe it has at least as much content as, say, some of my EctoComp stuff.

So I wanted to share it! Also, I wanted it to have a small home in case PlayFic.com ever goes down. I hope you enjoy it. There may be better ways it can be done, with better interfaces, and I would encourage other people to try that, too. It's a timeless problem with some tough pitfalls. Two states in particular are tricky. I'll let you peruse the source code for that!

But, for any interface problems, this is what I have, and it turned out to be a successful programming experiment.