Quoll Work Thread, 2024-09-23 #1 - 2024-09-23 10:58
Welcome to the first non-introductory post on the website!
Over on Cohost, I got in the habit of doing actual blow-by-blow, real-time dev posts as I worked on my projects and while I don’t think it ever really had a big audience, I found it extremely helpful for my own needs, especially when a few months have passed and I don’t remember what I was thinking. I eventually want to pull over all of those posts here, but I can get to that later.
I often use it for thinking out loud more than anything, and like I said, they are real-time as I’m working on it, unlike the dev diaries on the Quoll website, which are usually written after I have finished something, and are meant to be more digestible than the train-of-thought these have. These work threads are the main reason I wanted to get this website up, even missing features that want, such as footnotes (which I just realized I didn’t implement, and you best believe this girl loves making snarky footnotes).
But enough intro, let’s get to work.
Before I got pulled off on website work, I was working on pulling in the Smarter Parser by Aaron Reed extension into the game because I feel like it will provide helpful guidance on how to use the archaic Inform parser. However, all of the responses defined in the extension are not written in a way that works well for my game because they are written in first-person perspective, and this is normally fine because most text adventures are written in second-person. Additionally, they are a great point to add some flavor to the game that matches the kayfabe that the Playerr is talking with Ada through a program.
There are actually 20 such messages, and while writing in smarmy slightly sinister corp-speak has been fun, I have 4 more left of these. I was about to knock them out when the news of Cohost closing came and that wrecked my ability to focus. And then I was working on the website, and then I got other bad news, and then I got the website good enough to be able to do things and now I’m going to wrap up the last 4 messages I need to write.
So let’s do that!