Obviously, the quickest way to thwart an alien invasion is to run around and smash all their precious cups. Unable to take vital tea breaks and horrified by the savage violence inflicted upon their crockery, the aliens will have no option but to call off their invasion.
But, as a trouble-making earthling, how does one know which rooms in the UFO still have unsmashed cups in? It’s a problem.
So I added some handy terminal units around the UFO, where you can access a scanner which gives the location of all the unsmashed cups.
This feature kind of got away from me - it just kept getting more elaborate. I intended to just have a simple map. Then I thought it should show the players location too. Then I figured it should look like a cool retro green-screen computer terminal. Then I realised it was impossible to depict a computer keyboard without the option to have the cat paw away randomly at keys. And if you’re going to be pawing away randomly at keys, it’s likely to crash.
So I ended up burning through way more precious RAM than I’ve have liked. But some features just take on a life of their own. I’m going to have to be a little more clever about decompression upon startup, but I think I can claw back the memory I wasted on this stupid feature.
There’s probably a lesson to be learned here. But I’m determined not to learn it.