CombatEN 1.0.21 - Changing your weapon with a menu

Hi, all!

With version 1.0.21, things get more interesting. Using a menu that appears in the “Duel01” passage, the player can change his weapon during combat.
It might be interesting to look at the “Duel01”, “Setup Opponent” and “Pick Your Weapon” passages, as well as the $SkipBlow variable (changing your xeapon costs one turn).

CombatEN.zip (96.2 KB)

This opinion is entirely based on my personal experience, but I don’t think “young folk” care too much about text games in general. Although it’s true that parser games are a harder sell since most people like to play games on their phone instead of PC these days, if you think switching to Twine will give you a huge boost in players, I think you may be disappointed.

I do see a bit of revival with text games (especially choice based ones) lately, but whenever I mention them to any of my friends (RL or online), they’ve never even heard of them. Not even the Choice of Games games, which I definitely think has the lion’s share of text games on mobile.

Anyway, that’s just my thought on the state of things. As for porting, I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work. Twine is just HTML and JS with some markup to make things easier. I bet you’ll find it’s a lot easier to do what you want in Twine than it was in Inform 7.

One note though: You may want to consider Sugarcube over Harlowe. It’s a lot easier to do complex things in it with JS than Harlowe is.

I’ll second that bit. Most people who want to do more complex things in Twine use SugarCube because it’s a lot more flexible and has a lot more built-in features.

Also, I have my Universal Inventory System (UInv) written for Twine/SugarCube, so combining your combat system with UInv would get people a lot closer to easily making Twine-based RPGs.

As far as the number of people who play Twine games goes, I don’t know, so I’d merely be speculating on that. However, I can tell you that the number of people developing games in Twine has been steadily rising. Looking at the statistics of the r/twinegames subreddit (where I’m a mod), it hit 1k subscribers in Aug. 2017, 2k subscribers June 2019, and is on track to hit 3k subscribers in about two months (source). Or, to put it another way, it took just under 2 years to go from 1k to 2k subscribers, and it’s likely to take under 1 year to go from 2k to 3k subscribers. It’s a promising trend.

I’d be surprised if this didn’t also translate to more people playing Twine games as well.

Furthermore, I see a lot of Twine/SugarCube developers asking for help with a combat system. The more tools we put out there, the more popular the format gets, and the more Twine games there are out there for people to play.

So, thank you for the combat system, Thierry, it’s likely to be a popular Twine tool, though probably likely to be more popular if you port it to use SugarCube as well. :wink:

Let me know if you need any help with that. :slight_smile:

1 Like

I’d actually like to take a look at your Inform7 code if you feel comfortable sharing it; sounds very interesting.

@tayruh and HiEv:
As far as I can see, Harlowe has what I need. But, as I don’t know SugarCube very well, can you give some examples of what you mean?

@Multidimensional step:
On principle, why not? I’ll think about it.There might be a problem, though: apart of I7’s internal language, everything is in French.

Fixed a typing error ( already ! ).
Also, the thing now has a simple CSS stylesheet and a sidebar. That makes it more useful, I think.

CombatEN.zip (94.9 KB)

Hi, I’ve merged your topics together because I don’t think a new one is needed for each release.

1 Like

You’re right, thanks !

I assume you mean examples of how SugarCube is easier to do complex things with than Harlowe?

SugarCube comes with a standard sidebar that has a save/load dialog for multiple saves. It has widgets, macros, and templates to easily add new functions to your game. It has functionality for overriding how saves, loads, and passage navigation work. It has audio macros and audio APIs to make working with audio files much easier. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. See the SugarCube documentation for a full list.

Also, based on the use of the “SugarCube 2” flair vs the “Harlowe 2” & “Harlowe 3” flair in the r/twinegames subreddit, about twice as many people use SugarCube as use Harlowe.

So SugarCube is not only more flexible, it’s more popular among Twine developers as well.

@Dannii
How can I change the topic’s title to show a new version ?