I am creating a game in which the player is a revenant who must complete his task and save himself before his body rots away to nothing.
Questions:
Does Inform support the modification and addition or subtraction of body parts to the player character?
Does Inform support body parts that also function as other things-- like containers-- e.g. a hollow exposed ulna with a note rolled up in it?
Is it possible to have a “conversable” character that is also a vehicle, e.g. a hollow golem that will follow you but can also be ridden inside and steered?
Thank you for any answers you may be able to provide.
It does none of those things by deafult. But look at ch. 3.23 “Parts of things” and especially ex. 34 “Brown” for detaching parts – and also ch. 4.14 “Assemblies and body parts”, if you want all objects of a kind to come equipped with the same collection of parts.
Inform 7 does not support multiple inheritance, so an object can’t be both a person and a vehicle. But you can make a container part of a person:
Prague is a room.
South of Prague is Budweis.
The golem is a person in Prague.
The golem's interior is an enterable open opaque container. It is part of the golem.
Instead of entering the golem: try entering the golem's interior.
Persuasion rule for asking the golem to try doing something: persuasion succeeds.
Test me with "enter golem / golem, go south / exit".
If you enter the golem in Prague and tell it to go south, you can exit in Budweis.
The extension “Rideable Animals” lets you create a rideable animal, which would be both a person and a vehicle that you ride on top of; I’d guess that you might be able to create a person you ride inside of in a similar way, though I think it’d involve some fiddling in I6. Felix’s method is probably better.
Though, with a bit of misdirection, you can make multiple objects look and behave like a single object, fortunately, with the player never aware of the utter mess you’ve tangled behind the scenes for their amusement …
Actually, you don’t necessarily have to make a container part of the golem to enter it. You can simply make persons enterable:
