No Time To Play
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Weekly Links #148

Hello, everyone. Today, for only the second or third time in three years, this newsletter contains no actual links. Apologies. In my defense, I did keep working on Adventure Prompt, after coming up with a game idea that can properly showcase the engine's specific features. A big selling point of the system is the ability for authors to employ many text adventure tropes just by setting some properties on objects. And it's surprising how much can be done that way. Scenery/portal objects (they can double as doors that lead elsewhere) were trivial -- just another application of exits. Vehicles took only 100 lines of extra code in the interpreter (though that was a 20-25% increase), and the only recent addition to the editor, apart from more documentation. I could have crammed a minimal scripting language in that much space... but that would have shifted the burden on authors. Which is the opposite of what an authoring system is for.

Easy stuff will be easy no matter what. The trick is making the hard stuff easier as well.

Next: to do some more refactoring before adding what little is left (reading material and hidden object reveal, mainly), and then to see about fleshing out that demo game, because while the map and puzzle structure came easily, I had a hard time thinking of descriptions. And that's supposed to be my specialty.

See you next time, hopefully with more exciting news. Be well!