Release 4 thoughts

Over four years is a long time to develop such a short game, but then, I did some other stuff along the way. I finally feel like Psyops, Yo is at the end of what it could be, which may not be much, but it always feels nice to tie stuff up.

And it's weird putting out another release a day after, then another, then another. But they all do very different things: version 2 made gameplay smoother, version 3 implemented random text with a bookshelf of sorts, and version 4 used classes in Inform to expand that to several other items. I've had times where I had the momentum to do two quick releases and said "no this is silly," promptly losing it. So I take it when I can. Here, I pushed three through! Nobody's flagged me for spamming yet.

Perhaps one of the reasons for my progress was that the Internet was out, and I valued my time on the internet more, saying, okay, I'm only going to use it too push code to github, or search some python stuff online, and I don't want to get tangled up to where I said, you know, I wish I would have used that stretch of Internet up time a bit better. Of course, this isn't sustainable long term, but sometimes the time is right and you just have the right motivation to do something. But it's important to ask yourself regularly, if I only had 15 minutes of Internet access, how would I use it? And can I keep myself productive with the Internet out? I did so, and well, this weekend. Far better than usual, I must confess. So I'm glad I seized the day, or weekend. At some points I even forgot to check if Internet access was back up! Now to make such progress even with the Internet up.

I don't know when official work on *Psyops, Yo* started, but I know I thought of the name Toronto Ron years ago, with my first two anagram games like Shuffling Around and A Roiling Original. Toronto Ron deserved a place! And in release 4, he found it. As owner of an exclusive club you can't enter. But you get to win the game instead. It's strictly for amusement.

I consider the official work on a wordplay game started once I write a real, rigorous Python script to say, what can I do with this word-related oddity? I forget if the title came first, or an item did. I wish I'd taken better notes during the pandemic. But I think it spawned from my looking for words or phrases that could anagram themselves or had more than one group of letters. So it neighbors Tours Roust Torus, my third anagram game, which is also up on itch.io. The idea of having letters or words repeating, without being too repetitive, interests me. I felt it had to be rare, rare enough for a focused game but hopefully not too rare to show anything.

So what took four years? The first release should have happened in October 2020, but I forgot that EctoComp was released for the morning of October 31st, not by the end. So it waited a year, and I still procrastinated to push it through. It's funny, you only get four hours in Petite Mort, so it should not take long. But then planning the optimal ways to reach in and use a few minutes takes time itself.

Then because I entered it in Petite Mort, it had holes, and there wasn't much description to it. I think I even sent in the wrong binary build, because the Inform IDE didn't save the binary automatically but asked me where to save it, and I canceled, so that didn't work out so great. This is on me--I use an old IDE, and I'd seen the behavior before, and I didn't so a smoke test.

So I wondered if updating was really worth it, being a small game and all. But eventually in my weekly writing files, the idea started piling up. Maybe even just one a week! I noticed a word pair here or there, or I had a near miss that led me to something. Yet it seemed to fall into that not so sweet spot of having too much to take care of at once, but not enough to put out a new release. Of course, a lot of that is in my mind, and it's an excuse to procrastinate.

Just now in 2025, though, I think I used Psyops, Yo as an excuse to procrastinate even bigger and more ambitious projects, or maybe I will legitimately be able to frame it as "I was ramping up to something bigger, because I felt a bit rusty." Either way, I used my general extract-from-weekly-files script (written and fine-tuned between 2021 and 2025) to pull Psyops, Yo related notes into its main notes file. I saw a lot I could work with and that I enjoyed.

There were a lot of word pairs that were scraps and didn't seem to fit in the game, but I'd been there before, and I decided to put them into a bookshelf, because of course book titles can have weird names. It's not the first time I've done this sort of thing, but it was satisfying, and there aren't too many of them. So perhaps part of the delay was just saying, why bother to overwork myself with refurbishing a small game until the tools are in place? And, of course, there were proper names.

I think it's nice window dressing for what's not a big game. After all, Psyops, Yo can be solved in eight moves with four point-scoring commands. The best ending, six total points, requires ten total moves. So I wanted to add new stuff in.

And as an added bonus, because it wasn't very big, I really had fun going back through end trying stuff and making sure nothing broke, or certain things were implemented, and I didn't get tired of it or exhausted with the possibilities as I did with bigger games. I didn't write any serious test scripts for it, but maybe that is some other time. That might be for a very low-leverage maintenance release, when I have nothing else to do, and maybe I find only minor bugs. Or maybe writing the test scripts ill be useful to test, well, my test script producing scripts. That said, the "Tests" file on github has CHURN, one command I'm pleased with.

I realized how much my procedure had grown since 2020, when it really wasn't all that bad, because I had everything there just ready to go, and stuff that I remember dreading then has become more streamlined now. I didn't have stuff like automating creating header files, or being able to move certain types of code from main files into more organized header files. All this seems trivial, but it adds up. I also, because the game was not very big, was able to look at a lot of the stubs and utilities I'd written, and focus on how to make them more usable, because I didn't really need to do any huge technical gymnastics. It was a nice break from testing the game, when I needed it.

Yes, a lot of the changes are things that really should be in the first release of any decent game, or at least they would be if I had more than four hours to write it, thus violating the premise of the competition. I remember feeling bad off and on that I never really got back to it, but as it turns out, this weekend of fixing bugs and adding features, trivia was they were, seemed like just about the right time to take care of everything. I really do enjoy EctoComp Petite Mort saying "four hours. Focus on what is most important." It helps, even if the initial product is off.

The full changes are on the GitHub page. Since 2021, I've become a lot more comfortable using classes in Inform or Python. And I recalled certain bits of code where I had to update things in several places, which was okay, and I didn't want to get too greedy/lazy, but then I did the mental work of making something that worked more general.

As for my notes file? It was maybe 300 lines, a lot of which was whitespace e.g.

**NOTES FROM 20250101.txt

One single word pair

<line break after>

A big chunk was actually notes for Tours Roust  Torus, which all got used, including a text map. So I went from being intimidated to wishing there was more, especially since there were duplicates. Of course there were, with ideas written a year apart.

This may seem kind of bad, but on the other hand it's a reminder that I do have those ideas that are persistent, and the good ones come back and say "Use me already." Finally I manage to. The duplicated ones generally are a small cut above, or they lead to something neat I can't believe I missed. And speaking of duplication: I see how slogs-log could duplicate logs/slogs in an anagram game, and I passed on scans/can due to a bonus point in A Roiling Original. And the NOT-SNOTS list of barred people echoes naughty-say-snotty which is an idea for a Pig Latin based game I have ideas for. (There may be more direct ones, especially in the random text.) But I guess there has to be some overlap, and doing nothing, while an effective way to avoid that fear, makes nobody happy.

I'm down to ten lines in my notes now that I've implemented the random tables. One of the last I deleted was "HELF-Shelfs" paying homage to that Far Side cartoon where steps in the snow spell out HELF, so the rescue plane calls off the search. It was already in as a funny guess in Shuffling, around the Flesh Shelf room.

There are only so many possibilities, which is nice, as Psyops, Yo thus feels like a project I can really close the door on, and that's rare. Most of the time when I move on, I'm regretful that I couldn't fill in those last details, because there's a neat new project ahead, but I guess I did enough. Not here.

Well, maybe a year down the road I will dump more random text in, if bugs are uncovered. But, unlike many of my games that feel complete, Psyops, Yo feels absolutely complete for real. There's nothing more to do. I look forward to moving on to those bigger projects I mentioned above.