# this is general information I didn't want to duplicate
TXT	ABOUT	Write or Reflect is sort of factual and sort of speculative at the same time. I'm aware there's no shortage of "my lousy writer's block" works, so if I wrote one, I hopefully could make something funny and relevant and not too ponderous.
TXT	ABOUT	I originally had this planned as an EctoComp Petite Mort game, but it went over 4 hours. I liked having the binary choice available.
TXT	ABOUT	It's not the first game to have pretty much binary choices, as The Ascot has what's probably a better underlying puzzle, but I really like what I have, and I hope you have an "oh, that's neat" moment at the end.
TXT	ABOUT	You might be surprised at what else inspired it! That's seen in AX (About, extended).
# expanded about
TXT	ABOUTX	Mike Spivey's _A Beauty Cold and Austere_ has an influence on this, because it's about exploring stuff that looks odd or that you don't understand in general. I remember him roughly asking me "Well, what would you add, if you could?" My response was the cubic or quadratic formula, which seems impractical, I know. But it opened the question: what sort of exploration COULD we do?
TXT	ABOUTX	Then I remembered an old high school math contest with an interesting problem that is the crux of what's going on here. I got it right with brute force when I saw the pattern. But I struggled to find why. An upperclassman showed me. And I wondered how I could've seen it earlier, or looked at the right thing, to understand the pattern? It was a driving force to learn stuff beyond getting the next math contest problem right.
TXT	ABOUTX	_Progress Quest_ had influence on this, too. The whole idea of having to (very oblique spoiler) work exponentially harder to level up amused me, but of course I wanted to give you a way to solve things.
# credits
TXT	CREDITS	Thanks to StackOverflow for so much Python help.
TXT	CREDITS	Thanks to Brian Rushton for taking over Spring Thing after Aaron Reed's long tenure and continuing to allow a Back Garden. Progress on WoR was much slower than I'd like, and I really only had the technical shell of a program.
TXT	CREDITS	Thanks to people who helped me mid-comp. GrahamW and Leon Lin, who wrote Insomnia, a 2023 Spring Thing entry that also provides a way to direct you to ending branches you haven't seen before. JJMcC had a very useful transcript, and I'm grateful for an anonymous PM, too, helping me hash out things I probably should've fixed before the comp.
TXT	CREDITS	Thanks to Spring Thing reviewers, too, for helping the comp become more active over the years!
TXT	CREDITS	Extended/tangential credits are shown with CX.
TXT	CREDITSX	So many people have helped me with understanding why things work, and so many have been okay with the how without forcing the why on me. Sometimes, later, I wanted to see the why. But I was glad I was not pressured. Places like Dr. Dave Kelly's Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics (HCSSiM) were wonderful for, well, just having fun learning and not worrying if you were at the cutting edge. I also had very good math teachers. Listing them might be tedious.
TXT	CREDITSX	Thanks to Dave Revelle in particular for showing me the solution, so to speak, to WoR (at least the first book) long ago. Whether or not he ever stumbles on this, he probably won't remember any of the math stuff he helped me with, but he answered so many dumb questions of mine without treating me like an idiot. This was one of those problems that helped me realize I could access a lot beyond just being good at formulas and equations and brute force calculation. I forget who showed me the solution to book two.
TXT	CREDITSX	Thanks to Dr. George Berzsenyi at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, whose mail-in math-proof contest was such fun to work at in high school. I knew it helped me grow, but in fact it helped me grow even more than I thought. And it focused on problems like the one central to this game.
# help
TXT	HELP	You can give no command or ? to get help.
TXT	HELP	N puts Write or Reflect in normal mode. H puts it in helpful mode. Normal mode will not redirect you from roads you traveled before. Helpful will.
TXT	HELP	Most commands will be W or R or, later, you can string them together as need be.
TXT	HELP	A gives ABOUT information, and C gives CREDITS. AX and CX give some extended ABOUT and CREDITS as well.
TXT	HELP	Q twice in a row quits.
TXT	HELPX	You're far enough along that guessing how many different sessions there are will help speed things up.
#
TXT	INTROCHOICE	Write or Reflect has two modes, (H)elpful or (N)ormal. This can be changed in-game, but they're different enough, I want to give you your choice to start.
TXT	INTROCHOICE	Normal will not warn you when you reach a point where all paths ahead are exhausted. This may lengthen game time.
TXT	INTROCHOICE	Helpful ushers you only to points where you haven't exhausted all possible paths yet. This shortens game time but creates less challenge.
TXT	INTROCHOICE	Paths taken can also be tracked with the (P) command, so this option is more about having an additional bumper to help push you ahead, if you want it.
TXT	INTROCHOICE	For those who enjoy the challenge of mathematical puzzles, (N)ormal is recommended. Others, or those with less time, may wish to try (H)elpful.
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