Thanks for letting us know! I’ll be spreading the word to the WiPs I follow and encourage others to do the same!
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Personally, I don’t see a point to enforcing capitalization for player-inputted names; if someone wants to be stylized as e e cummings or Johannes van der Meer who am I to crush their dreams? Live your best fictional life, Victor d’Hondt.
If user error is a concern, you could always have a “Your first name is ‘aaaaaaaaron’? Are you sure?” confirmation question. Or do what Fallen Hero does:
*input_text name
*comment check capitalization
*if ("${name}" != "$!{name}")
Your name is $!{name}, right?
*choice
#Yes.
*set name "$!{name}"
*goto lastname
#No, my name is ${name}, just as I spelled it.
*goto lastname
If I for some reason did want to force capitalization, I’d cap it then and there
*input_text name
*set name "$!{name}"
and call it a day.
IMO, $!{var} is best used when the variable in question should sometimes be capitalized and sometimes be lowercase. If it should literally always be capitalized, why not capitalize it from the start? Quicker and less error-prone than trying to ensure every single reference to the player’s name is typed as $!{name}.
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Thank you very much, I’ll get to work with this! Just to be sure, when you mention spacing out the lines, you mean starting a new paragraph right?
EDIT:
I’ve changed it a bit, adding spaces (like I believe you meant), added a short description of the deformed figure, and tried to emphasize the looming shadow a little bit more.
Like this?
You are standing at the center of the marketplace, looking around you to find your regular merchant. But as much as you try, you cannot seem to focus your view. The many people around you passing by are a blur, and you are starting to get disoriented. You are suddenly very aware of the sweat running down your face and you feel an impending sense of doom.
All of a sudden, you get pushed from behind and you tumble forward, your arms ahead of you looking for anything solid to grab. You land both hands on a market stall and as you look up, you get frightened by the deformed image of a man standing what must be 3 meters tall, covered in branches and bark, and stumble backwards.
You trip over a passing leg and end up on your back in the middle of the marketplace again. You start frantically looking around you, searching the crowd for the figure you’d just seen. In the blink of an eye, a large shadow looms over you and you can sense something behind you. You feel a sharp pain shooting through your entire body, and you want to scurry away. But your body just doesn’t respond anymore. A loud scream leaves your lungs and suddenly everything is dark.
You look around you to make out the sleeping quarters of the inn in the dark. You are drenched in sweat and can feel your heart almost coming out of your chest. It was just a bad dream. Though something makes you feel there was more to it than that. ‘The Copperhead Guardian’, the words still echoing in your mind.
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This is a public service announcement from your obnoxious resident pedant to point out that Edward Estlin Cummings was in the habit of writing his own name with normal capitalization. It was publishers who stylized his name in all lowercase. He is properly referred to in writing as “E.E. Cummings.” Y’all can go pick on bell hooks instead. 
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Oh don’t worry they all get the bow. But at the moment it’s just a “bow” so it doesn’t need a variable yet.
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Seems fine to me! A gentle suggestion though—if someone doesn’t explicitly ask for feedback when sharing their snippet, it would be safer to assume that they’re not looking for it, and are simply sharing in the spirit of Snippet Day. Asking the way you did is good, but perhaps wait for an answer before presenting said feedback as well.
Yay, we love prison buddies! (Hopefully? I hope they’re nice)
Oh gosh. I always choose to enforce capitalization for propriety’s? pedanticism’s sake, but I hadn’t thought at all about the surnames out there that actually start with a lowercase letter. Welp. Time to go rethink everything.
That’s a good tip. Thanks!
Well, that’s interesting information. I’m curious, do you happen to know why the publishers decided to do that?
I'm a bit late, as I tend to be, but snippety snippet about a vampire lady doing, y'know, non-suspicious things
“What business do you have with that man?” Ronan sounds concerned.
“It’s genuinely best if you don’t know, darling.” Never mind whether or not you even want to tell her—it’s in both of your best interests to cut off her involvement at this.
You’ve been alive (so to speak) for long enough that you’ve developed a natural air of authority that sensible people, at least, can recognize, and Ronan nods at your words, understanding implicitly that you are, of course, right. Though she still looks mildly troubled, she asks no further questions.
I think I’m quite lucky I was able to get some writing done last week, functioning as a human being is extra challenging this week. At least I scraped out some progress on job-hunting stuff. ADHD is such a scam though, guys, I definitely don’t recommend it. (I’ve been spacing out on this draft for… uh… I don’t know but it’s been way too long and I should go prepare for bed now, it’s now 3am. 
)
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Yes, these two are nice; Salah is a Saracen slave, and Nell is a courtesan. Both are friendly to Robin if you meet them in prison.
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Could be a snippet out of my own journal
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Yeah, just like that. It reads a lot clearer now.
Branches and bark make a great image!
Yeah, I might have overdid it a bit. Next time I’ll be chill.
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The—beings, for lack of a better word—that have to live with…
I’m new to using em dashes, is the the correct way to do it?
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I believe so, but different languages have different conventions, so I’m not 100%.
(Although I’d personally rather say “The beings—for lack of a better word—that have to live with…” but, em-dash-technically it seems correct to me.)
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The feeling I’m trying to get across is that the innkeeper has a short moment of doubt, looking for the right word, before going with “beings” for lack of a better word.
Would “The…beings—for lack of a better word—that have to live with…” be a better way of doing that?
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You’d need whitespace after the … so
The… beings
but otherwise, yeah.
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Yeah typo there, but thanks for the help!
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Also late, but here’s a snippet right before the player reaches the climax of the most recent case. Haven’t been happy with output/quality of writing recently. Distractions fracture mind, so many distractions.
Snippet
Step carefully over the ponds, for you can see through the clear water that there is no bottom. Walk softly between the roots, for the tress in Wonderland are far friendlier than our own, and do not bleed sap. Mind the fluttering butterflies, for their wings are mesmerizing, and if they bite you your veins may be filled with the same smoke as their own. Keep your riddles to yourself, for the creatures here know riddles, and through the riddles may in turn know you. And it is by knowing you that your Wonderland may be formed.
[i]The trouble isn’t that your mind is your own. It is that nobody else may see it and know you. We must rely on what others care to show us. A carefully carved silhouette in the shadow of their flame. We meet in Plato’s cave, our sky is our own.
There is music on your tongue, there are words in the air. You see men and women clothed in white robes, masks still clasped tightly. Some dance. Some look fearfully at the shadowed halls behind them. Some are hunched and crooked. Even more are hunched and crooked, but stand tall in the green light all the same. Flowers bloom all along the ground, red and yellow and green and thecolorof${e_hisher}iris and purple and orange. And across the room is the breach, migraine aura shimmering unnatural against the realities of surface pressure and gravity. Verdant fields and picnic baskets. Bandages for your head wounds. You smell pecan pie and hospital food. A pile of masks lie beside the breach, empty eyes and emptier smiles.
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I got sidetracked today with the Dashingdon stuff and scurrying around posting information about it, but I finished the coding for Chapter 2 of Project Amble today, did my stats/difficulty balancing, and playtested the placeholder to see if the pacing felt OK. Then I wrote the first few pages of the chapter. I’ve reached about 11,000 words of average playthrough now, so it’s a novelette now!
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That’s a novelette? Woo, I have a novelette-length project then as well.
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You and me both…
In other news, I’m hoping to get back to writing on my IF again. It’s been an entire week of work burn out, unrealistic deadlines, and crunch, so… hoping I can attempt to even get in 100 words per day by this weekend and keep it up despite the horrendous work conditions.
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How did you find that footage of me?? 
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I added about half of a new scene to chapter one today 
I realized that in order to have one type of interaction in chapter two, I needed to first show its opposite in chapter one. Kind of like “here’s your normal experience… okay now here’s a very different interaction.” I got to explore MC’s relationships with their community a little too, which always makes me happy. Anytime I can make MC feel embedded into the story by giving them a life that intertwines with and also exists separately from the main plot feels like a win. Also, thank you @HarrisPS for raising awareness about dashingdon. I found out through one of your posts
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