For some more thoughts, please read the comments section.
First, I'd like to express my thanks to Skull for pointing out that it was Cloud Castle 2's 10-year anniversary a few days ago, and to Tim for his continuing COTPATD series, both of which led me to create this release.
I find it really difficult to believe that I released Initiation 10 years ago.
Two weeks ago, not realizing that the 10 year anniversary was coming up, I played through it again, fully, which is something I haven't done since it was released. Every couple years I'd start up the introduction, then I'd quit, but I wanted to play through it to see how my experience aligned with Tim's forthcoming play-through.
I was surprised to see how much I'd forgotten, and how frustrated I was with some of the puzzles and hidden paths. Sure, every couple years someone would complain about not being able to find the purple key, or Gertrude, but I chalked that up to player inexperience or incompetence. And yet, I had those same problems. I even had to look up the answer to some of the riddles.
I was very disappointed in myself: I've long thought that Initiation was 'my best D-Mod ever', and thanks to the passage of time, I was able to see the flaws clearly and without (much) prejudice.
Then, late last week, my wife tried playing Initiation, as her very first Dink Smallwood experience. That was eye-opening: I have Dink 'instincts' that she completely lacked. I knew to hold a direction key during a conversation to see when the conversation ended, and to tap space at just the right time to skip through it, and she had difficulty just moving Dink around without getting stuck on rocks and walls. It made me realize that the Hard.dat Rewrite I created really wasn't good; it was mostly the small fiddly bits of hardness that she got stuck on. I apologized a lot.
She decided that she just wanted to kill everything (thanks ultimate cheat!). That identified a few other bugs (yellow key not appearing, green key appearing twice). She gave up after playing for a couple hours (which is actually rather impressive, as she grows bored with games quite quickly).
Then Skull posted about Cloud Castle 2's anniversary, and I started thinking about this release. I decided to fix the yellow key issue, and I thought I might as well add more hints for the parts that I got stuck on, and I found more bugs along the way, and fixed those too.
Initiation still isn't perfect. Skull's criticism is still valid (there isn't a plot that drives the player into action). The key system should really be something that's gameplay related (like different skills/spells that clear certain blocking areas). The riddle gates shouldn't have been included from the start, but they were trendy at the time. And I'm the worst at coming up with character names (even worse than ABCD..., I think). But, I hope that this release is much more friendly to players, new and old alike.
Also, one really weird coincidence: my wife and I were married two years ago today, on September 29th, 2012. Weird!
