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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, 2025-10-11 #2 - 2025-10-11 23:45

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

Well, I finished implementing booping, but then I followed it up by implementing and writing conversational responses for the Instruction Grues that Ada uses to run her SGL programs, and while doing that I thought of two more affection verbs…

While it definitely created extra work, it’s been very beneficial that I have been forced to yet again fix issues in conversation due to testing conversations around grues. The really big one is that now Playerrs have reason to command Ada to try to talk in the only dark room in the game, which caused a problem with the conversation queue phrase I added to better handle deciding who to talk to during implicit conversation:

To decide which list of people is the conversation queue:
  let PL be the list of visible people;
  remove the player from PL;
  sort PL in reverse conversational priority order;
  decide on PL.

The issue here was the line remove the player from PL, because if Ada (who is the player) is in a dark room, she’s not in the list of visible people, so this caused a run-time error. Very easy fix of using the remove the player from PL, if present variation of the phrase.

Another issue I ran into was getting a disambiguation prompt while issuing the command “TELL GRUE ABOUT GLITCH”. See, I thought it was obvious that I meant Ada’s skunktaur tutor Glitch the Skunktaur, but other possibilities such as the concept of Glitch Space and the First Note from Glitch that appears in the Seattle Apartment Level seemed just as likely to the parser. Another easy fix by using Does the player mean... rules:

Does the player mean quizzing someone about Glitch the Skunktaur: it is very likely.
Does the player mean informing someone about Glitch the Skunktaur: it is very likely.

I also got to remove some redundant code around GIVing or SHOWing things to plushies, and needed to make grues familiar to Ada so she can successfully ask about them since the Conversation Package by Eric Eve will not let her converse about things that are not known to her.

But one of the things I realized as I was writing responses for showing affection to grues is that I had forgotten two affection verbs that I really should include if I’m allowing so much affection to grues: petting and scritching. That hopefully shouldn't be too hard to add, but it’ll be something for a later day probably! This is yet another round of yak shaving that all goes back to me being moved to write Ada hugging Glitch in one path, and knowing that Playerrs will want to command her to do the same to pretty much everything like the gremlins they are.

Well, good amount of work today regardless, and maybe I’ll do a bit more after a break, but probably not.

Jaycie “chimerror” Mitchell