Quoll Work Thread, 2025-01-11 - 2025-01-11 17:14
With the new job coming up, I’ve forced myself to focus on cleaning up around the house to hopefully get it as together and clean as possible before I have to juggle going to work 5 days a week with cleaning. So I haven’t been working on any projects. But today is a good day to put in a bit of project work, so I’m going to get back on my changes to allow commands like “ASK GLITCH ABOUT TAFFANY'S CDS”. Not much more to say on that right now, so for the below-the-cut portion of this post, I want to copy over some musing about how to proceed with Quoll overall that I posted earlier today on the Fediverse.
Musings with slight editing follow:
I’ve definitely said similar stuff before but I put it well last night when I was talking with friends: “it’s been increasingly weird to write about the collapse of society as I imagined it in 2020 as I’m living through it in 2025.” Or more, I didn’t make the game fast enough, so we’re all being forced to live in it. But I think the biggest thing is that I’m tiring of the effort of working in Inform 7, but the trappings of parser IF have become big basic pillars of the world, and I can’t easily drop them because they remain very compelling to me.
But I have an idea that can let me have some room to not stress over the parser so much: pull in the hypertext interface extension, which would put links in the text that can be used instead of the parser. When I first saw this, I didn’t really like it, because I like the parser interface and was used to it. but I’ve been thinking about the issues with parser IF and it actually helps a lot, simply because you can put these on interactable items and avoid having to guess the verb/noun.
However, it breaks the conceit that you are giving commands to Ada by talking to her, which is honestly something I very much like. Like yeah, I guess I’ll say that it basically still generates the command to click, but it’s obviously less direct. And that reminds me of one of the major things I wanted to represent in this game: unaware edits of reality.
Right now, Ada’s obliviousness to changes comes across in a very natural way where she simply describes what she sees. And since everything is described through her, it’s baked in. But if I were to move to a graphical interface, then it becomes less natural to demonstrate that. Though I think that’s one thing I should be careful to not blame Inform for, because I am the one who has chosen to make a time travel/reality edit story with different awarenesses of it, and no matter what that’s going to make keeping track of it all narratively harder, no matter what IF engine I use.
Ah well, to be honest, it’s tough, but I wouldn’t have put so much effort in if I didn’t like it to some degree. I think my lack of progress over this year has been more emotional burnout from real life than anything. And I think my big fear is that is not about to let up so I need something easier to aim at.