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Hello! This is Chimerror Productions, a website by Jaycie “chimerror” Mitchell to show off her various artistic works as well as blog posts about making those works, such as this most recent one:

Quoll Work Thread, 2024-10-15 #3 - 2024-10-15 19:54

Tags: blog gamedev inform7 interactive fiction programming quoll testing text adventures writing

After quite a bit more of work, I now have flavor text in for my main pathway that I’m testing and have created tests for the other three topics that Ada can ask about to advance the tutorial even though I’m putting off on writing the actual flavor until later. (I have a lot to do and it feels more like a job for writer brain than coder brain.)

However, given that I touched a few responses for the tutorial node before this as well as responses that should have been hit by other tests already, I think it’s a good time to run the tests and at least keep them up to see if I broke anything too serious, which will do it for me tonight, most likely.

So part of the reason for this is that there are two types of way that Ada can greet a character. Either Ada is explicitly told to “SAY HELLO TO GLITCH” or she “implicitly” does it when given a conversational command for a character she hasn’t started talking to yet such as “ASK GLITCH ABOUT TAFFANY”. There are two separate Rulebooks for each of these paths, and while the Implicit Greeting Response Rulebook will defer to the Greeting Response Rulebook if no implicit responses are defined, it will not do that if one is defined, as I did for an absolute default that I honestly hope never shows up in game, but should be OK if it does:

Implicit greeting response for Glitch the Skunktaur:
    "Glitch looks up at me as I speak[one of] and begins speaking. 'Oh, you made it! Wonderful! Are you ready to
    take off the training wheels and learn some [italic type]real[roman type] magic?'[or].[stopping]";
    now conversed-this-turn is true.

This code is so old that the first line defining the rule was written back in April 2022 and hasn’t received any changes since before the very first release of Glitch’s Non-Breaking Space in January 2023. And that’s going to stay the case, because I didn’t need to make any changes, but I did have to add some code to force my tutorial specific greeting to be used for implicit greeting as well:

Greeting Response for Glitch the Skunktaur when the node of Glitch the Skunktaur is
glitch-level-1-tutorial-1-taffany-tutorial:
	have glitch greet ada for taffany tutorial.

Implicit Greeting Response for Glitch the Skunktaur when the node of Glitch the Skunktaur is
glitch-level-1-tutorial-1-taffany-tutorial:
	have glitch greet ada for taffany tutorial.

To have glitch greet ada for taffany tutorial:
    say "Glitch and the Annoying Skunktaur Puppet both wave at me before Glitch adds 'Howdy, Ada dearie! Getting real
    excited for you to meet your skunktaur tutors['] pawiwork[if greeting type is explicit]! Just ASK FOR the
    TUTORIAL[end if]!'.";
	now conversed-this-turn is true.

Note how I use the greeting type variable defined by Conversation Framework to avoid having Glitch suggest to “ASK FOR the TUTORIAL” when the greeting is implicit because it very well may be that the Playerr told Ada to do exactly that.

Either way, I made good progress today even though I’m beginning to boggle at how much I still have to do. Nothing to do but keep pecking away at it…

Jaycie “chimerror” Mitchell