I want to start a game with an arbitrary text instead of a room description. “When play begins” doesn’t help me much as that’s printed before the story title, and there I already have some text. I experimented with scenes, “Instead of looking” and turn count but had no luck. It seems the game starts with turn count 1 and after first player input, it is still turn 1.
Is there any canonical way to achieve what I want? Is there any way at all?
Janka
Try “Instead of looking for the first time”.
The hook you are looking for is “after printing the banner text”:
After printing the banner text:
say "[line break]Howdy!"
However, that won’t suppress the room description on the first turn, it will merely add some text between the title and the initial room description. To suppress the first room description, you can do this:
Instead of looking for the first time:
do nothing.
(A “look” command is generated at the beginning of the game, which is what generates the room description, so we can get rid of it by just suppressing the look.)
If you need to suppress the room description anyway, then you might as well put your initial text in the “instead of looking” rule and forget about the “after printing the banner text”, e.g.:
Instead of looking for the first time:
say "[line break]Howdy!".
–Erik
There’s a potential SNAFU here: the intro is not the only place where the banner is displayed. This method will show the text also when the player commands VERSION or when they start recording a transcript.
Ah, that’s right. Thanks for pointing that out. The proper way to do this without suppressing the first room description is:
Before looking for the first time:
say "Howdy!";
continue the action.
–Erik
Ahh, thanks.
Janka