Three Dollar Quill

Recently, I've been replaying some room escape games from back in high school, and I kind of want to make my own now. Since I never seem to end up wanting to do things quite like other people have done successfully in the past, I'm looking at something that's almost entirely flash-based and graphical, and thinking "What if I did a pure-text game in Ink?"

What I've got so far, conceptually, is that the player starts out in a log cabin; I don't know if I want it to be single-room, or a little more elaborate. As is the way of such things, there turns out to be some kind of elaborate underground complex below it.

It occurs to me that putting this through the default Ink web player would run the risk of things seriously lagging out. It's going to need some aggressive pruning of the narration to avoid things getting out of hand, but I don't have a good sense of how aggressive.

Anyway, this whole binge has mostly been Submachine thus far, so that's what I'm thinking of in terms of setting. It just occurred to me that I've played up through 9, started on 10, and I don't have a super-great handle on what the Submachine, like, is. Regardless, I don't want to just recapitulate the Submachine games, so I need a point of distinction. One thing I've wanted more of in games is some form of rigorous and interesting alchemy-ish crafting system. I ought to get back to Hadean Lands. Maybe instead of something like Hadean Lands's time loop thing, there could be repeatable activities for harvesting alchemy components?

I feel like the overall structure I'd want for such a thing would be to have a series of puzzles in the cabin that introduce the alchemy concepts from the end first, working backwards.

I probably need some other angle on this concept, to complement things, but I'm not going to come up with it right now; I'm super sleepy.