What would be the easiest way to make a journal for the player?
Like, after the player types “journal”, for example, all the important events that the player has faced so far would be listed to them.
Currently I am struggling with the order of the events: it would be nice to arrange the journal entries from oldest event to the most recent one. Currently I have managed only to print them in the order I put them in the code.
I would make an empty table, and add descriptions of experienced events to this table during the game. They will the automatically be in the order in which they were experienced, and you can print them out by repeating through the table.
You didn’t specify which system you’re using, but in I7 my first thought would be to use a table with columns for (1) the potential significant events, (2) a flag indicating whether the player has achieved the event, and (3) a “time-stamp,” representing the turn number on which it was achieved. When a given event occurs, the column 2 entry for event would be changed to true, and the column 3 entry would be changed to the turn number. When you need to print the events, reorder the table to put the column 3 entries in numerical order, and use the reordered table as the basis for the printed output. I haven’t tried it, but I would think the concept should be usable. I assume other systems would have a counterpart to this approach.
Robert Rothman