In Quest you would set up a “goblin” object, “flowers” object, “tree” object. You would then set the “display verbs” list for each object. For the goblin it would be “kill”, for flowers it would be “smell”, for the tree it would be “climb”. Then for each object you would implement those verbs on the Verbs tab - for the flowers, add “smell”, make it print a message or something.
Because you’d be disabling text input, it wouldn’t be too much effort to implement each object, because you know the player could only ever do the things to that object that are listed in the display verbs for that object. So you don’t need to worry about the player trying to climb the goblin, because the goblin wouldn’t provide a “climb” option when the player clicked the goblin link.
Nah, just that you mentioned at the beginning that you might want something like those sites where you use a wiki to make a CYOA – like this, I assumed – but where your work wouldn’t be open to editing by other people. I just thought that if you could host your own wiki, you might be able to set up a wiki like that and then have your account be the only one with editing privileges. But I don’t know how plausible it would be to set that up.
[UPDATE: And I don’t think it would give you any variables you could set, so never mind.]
Sadly, yes, you got lucky. If you try it in Google Chrome it won’t work off the disk, and if you try it in Internet Explorer, it won’t work unless you click on the security bar at the top of your screen and allow JS.
I posted my answer about this to the Google Group, but I’ll cross-post it here:
You can either do it all as a single chapter using *goto, or you can use *goto_scene to jump between chapters.
Having said that, I don’t think ChoiceScript is the best language for designing location-based games.
In a location-based language like Inform, you begin by defining a map of locations, the objects within them, and what the objects do. The actions you can take at any given time depend on where you are and what objects are around; in a location-based game, players are expected to explore the game’s map to find out what’s possible.
Location-based games usually include puzzles that control the flow of the plot, especially “locked door” puzzles where some locations are unreachable until the player solves a puzzle. The player is therefore completely in control of the pace of the story; the player might even “get stuck” by getting lost in the map of locations or by being unable to solve the next puzzle.
ChoiceScript is designed for games in which the author has complete control over the pace of the story, where one thing happens right after another, so it’s impossible to get lost or stuck.
So ChoiceScript has no built-in way to handle map locations (“rooms”), no inventory system, and no triggers (“do X whenever Y happens”). You could implement any of these yourself. The ChoiceScript language has *if and *goto, which means you can do practically anything that a Turing-complete universal computer can do. But it’s not necessarily going to be easy!
P.S. As you may be able to tell, I’m personally not such a big fan of location-based games. Getting lost or stuck gets in the way of interactive storytelling, IMO.
Think hard about what your story is about; if your story isn’t about exploration (and getting lost/stuck), then I recommend against including locations in your story.
Thanks dfabulich (and let me say your rapid replies have already put choicescript lightyears ahead of twine/twee in my mind).
Since you don’t seem to mind discussing here (where I won’t have to await comment moderation), let me explain a bit more.
You’re completely right about locations. And “scenes” is a much more accurate term for what I need.
I guess it is because you need to be able to “go back” to an earlier scene it is easy to think of them as locations.
But “scenes” is really all I need. One scene might well be “at the church” or “by the farm”. But another scene might be “Aunt Jemima shows up”, or for that matter, “Waking tired, trying to use your toothbrush to scrub away yesterday’s hangover”.
I am actively uninterested in mazes or making it difficult to know “where you are”.
You telling me you can visit any chapter in any order any number of times is key. Thank you. I really appreciate it, especially since ChoiceScript (and for that matter, Twine) has the direct simplicity I really really think I need to be able to pull off much of anything at all…!
(This is also the reason I hesitate using something like Quest. For example, in one scene the four choices might be four different lines of dialogue. Some of which might not even make grammatical sense. Since I am unsure a “verb” in Quest - or TADS - can be something along the lines of “please pass the salt, would you dearie?” without the program asking which dearie you’re talking to, or telling you things like “you don’t have the salt”… I simply have absolutely no need for a “parser”, and multiple ways of expressing your selection. Thus I really will try to make the simpler choice-based engines work before I have a second look at Quest, unless somebody can address specifically my issues and how me exactly how straight-forwardly or not they can be implemented)
Okay, so if I make an example ChoiceScript game, I need to pack up the entire (modified) zip file, and I need to state “use Chrome or IE at your own peril”. Gotcha. (And yes, I am not forgetting about CoGs offer to host the game; but that presumes a level of commitment, expertise, and completeness I’m not ready to subscribe to, at least not yet. Knowing you can just dump your stuff somewhere for actively interested parties to explore with a minimal amount of “ceremony” - I’m thinking of supplying a Rapidshare link at a forum like this one perhaps - is a real help to me.)
I downloaded IntroComp2011.zip and found the “Exile” game that looks like a ChoiceScript game.
I compared it to the CoG download (poetically called “dfabulich-choicescript-ee11ad2”) and noted Exile was much slimmer.
Where do I go if I want to find out exactly how much of the cruft in the CoG download I need to keep in the zip file?
Or perhaps looking at Exile’s folder gives me the answer? (Specifically, it contains two folders “icons” and “mygame” as well as a bunch of .js files in the archive root). However, I’m guessing you would need “cleaning instructions” to make this happen, so are there any such anywhere? Perhaps the Exile authors have posted on a CoG google grounds thread or something…)
Since “Gargoyle”, another IntroComp entry, features the exact same zip structure, I really think I’m onto something here…
Reason I’m asking is the response I got over at the Google groups:
Pardon the amateurish question, but… these contest entries do not contain any web folders?
To be clear, your better bet is to get some free hosting and copy the web folder in there; IE and Chrome work fine when you play the game on a web site.
Thanks. Yes, I’ve started getting the hang of things now.
Will settle for the distribution method used by those contest entries. For now at least.
I really appreciate the straight-forward way of building your adventure/story using CS. God knows it’s hard work to make even the smallest scene - when you take into account the number of choices you minimally need for the player to have a real impact on how the story proceeds…!
(I can only imagine the hours it took to write the text for even a single play-through of a story like Choice of Vampire or Intrigue… let alone all of them!
And yes, I do realize you need to start small… and I realize you should do what CS already encourages you to do, that is merge branches early and often. Merge, merge, merge! But still, you quickly end up with a LOT of variables and small description differences if you want previous decisions to influence later ones). Coming up with an idea for a scene is like 10 minutes of work, tops. Actually sketching this into details, making sure you aren’t missing something takes an hour. And then writing it… there goes your evening. Well, at least there isn’t a coding phase after that!
Well, anyway, thanks again to everybody for your help. And I’m sure glad you steered me in the direction of something like ChoiceScript; I can’t imagine how anyone ever managed to finish a story using anything more involved; CS uses simple text files with almost no control code, letting me focus on the text itself. That’s plenty difficult by itself phew
I’ll return somewhere sometime if and when I do get something finished enough for public consumption!
This is exactly what I thought! btw I think it’s nice that you want to offer so many different options. I like it when there are many details, just like in real life, and you can do a lot, although it makes the game more difficult, but it also gets more complex. It would be nice if it would be able to pick up flowers to send flowers to uk as a special feature
