@Killa_Robot there are walkthroughs in the Parlor if you want to explore the other endings. "A Child of Sandrella" is a good route to take if you've already played through once, as currently that walkthrough route accesses 7 endings. (Which I'll fix post-contest, as my ideal is to have a max of 4 choices at any end.) It isn't the best route for catching the actual stories he tells, though.
@3iguy, thank you. There is no official canon ending, but there are about 5 that I consider the "most likely" ends, if that is a thing. "A Child of Sandrella" is one of them. ("The Dreaming Forest," "The Vanishing Tale," "The Final Sacrifice," and "Kill the Muse" being the others.)
@bilbo, thanks. :) When you got the egg, did you get the ending with Sage or with Sandrella? I think "A Child of Sandrella" is the ending with the most information about what is happening. I like the idea of giving players a choice as to what they take from the captain. There's already 4 choices of gifts in the thrift shop, but it does make sense to have an option during negotiations as well. That might be something for my edit, if it works out.
@bucky "Forever Love" isn't the rarest ending, but I wanted a more traditional, happy sort of ending in the mix that wasn't too hard to reach, especially for those who aren't completionists and just want to play through once or twice and have a resolution. It also functions, with the remembrance paper, as a reward for those who do not take the 'easy way out' of money troubles.
@enterpride I did write most of the endings in the last few days of the contest (though I had most of them plotted from the beginning) so they got a little rushed - though none of them were meant to be multiple pages. The goal was a sort of quasi-resolution for most of them - his character arc either shows a change with one of his traits (selfish to sacrificial, obsessed with his lost love to willing to destroy his love, stagnating to embracing change, content in being in Ivani's shadow to finally stepping up himself, etc.) or he fully gives in to one of his negative traits (e.g. despair or anger at the world.) But he can, in most ends, only partially solve the worlds problems - if he gains any understanding of them at all. His journey was always one of hope, not assurance, that there would be something in the Grove to fix everything. In some endings he may save his love, or change himself so he can move forward in life, and only in some affect the larger problems of memory and stories. But most were also to set up the point that reaching the Grove, for him, isn't the end of a journey; it's still the beginning of his. He's spent 40 years stagnating in Dreaming Forest, and now he's travelled a few weeks in the real world, "awake" for the first time since he lost Ivani. He needs to step up and keep moving forward, no matter what he gains or fails to gain in the grove, rather than wallow and wait for the muses to come back. Humanity, too, needs to fight to move forward, regardless of what they lose or how hard it gets.
But I do plan to revisit the endings a bit in a post-contest edit, so if there is anything specific that you think needs work or more developed, or you think a specific ending really needs a second page/epilogue, please let me know.
