Chimerror Productions

Quoll Work Thread, 2024-10-14 #4 - 2024-10-14 23:26

Tags: blog gamedev inform7 programming quoll testing text adventures

And after long two-hour post-dinner work session I finally have one pathway through this tutorial implemented as scaffolding! A great place to end the night!

I still need to bring the flavor over from the Scrivener as well as create tests for the other 3 pathways, but I did implement the TODO list description and add the code to wrap up this tutorial, sending our skunktaur tutors to the next location.

I got a bit distracted because I realized a bit of an issue with some of the rules that come into play when trying to converse without specifying who Ada should talk to. Basically, by default it picks one of the visible People at random. This is normally fine, but in this case with the tutorial, I don’t want Ada to talk to Taffany before she has been told to do so by the tutors.

I first tried to create a very specific rule that runs in only this case but it required some repetition and didn’t quite work how I expected due to how rulebooks worked. Basically it would fall into the default rule after running, and I’m sure I could figure out how to stop that, but in the end, since I had already overridden the rules for selecting an interlocutor when one wasn’t specified (to exclude grues as interlocutors), I just wrote it there.

On the bright side, I realized that I do not need to have all of Taffany’s responses hint at her problem because I have the Annoying Skunktaur Puppet hint at there being a problem in the part of the tutorial that will be hit regardless. Big thanks for past writer me for giving me an out. Sorry I talked shit about you last post.

Either way, that’s a lot of work for today and I found myself yawning during this last session so I guess it’s time for me to go rest and get ready for bed. I’m glad to be working on this again. After this node, the rest of the nodes are pretty straightforward. In fact many of them don’t even require the Playerr to command Ada to do anything, which are very easy to test because they just fire off when Ada shows up.

I still think with all I have to do, and with a likely game jam coming up in November, the end of this year seems the most likely point for the next release, but I do think that is very possible after this hump!

Jaycie “chimerror” Mitchell