like @JoshGrams mentioned, it defaults back to the original word.
At the top of the image that @JoshGrams screenshotted we can clearly see the helper text that says “Click golden words to edit.”
i was meaning to ask you this question but i was at work the whole day xD
In terms of functionality and flexibility is it better to change the main mechanic to loop between choices upon click and/or make a setting that changes these aspects of the swappable words?
I think the slightly confused reaction you’re getting is just because this is an unfamiliar mechanic and no-one here has yet seen a game that makes use of it.
If you wrote something which took advantage of the unique interface (i.e. something which was better for having the user click one of the golden words and then choose what to type to replace it with, rather than a more conventional set of links to choose between), you’d probably get a lot more people suddenly interested in trying out your platform. But at the moment when you say “the player clicks on these words and then chooses what replacement to type”, a lot of people are asking “why do I want that?”
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FYI, what you’re describing here sounds similar to the <<cycle>> macro in Twine, which people are familiar with. (Documentation here.) You can use it to easily cycle through all options for the “golden word” (in your parlance) that the author has implemented.
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As Encorm said, cycling links are a thing that exists in Twine, and get used a fair bit for this kind of thing. They’re basically a replacement for a drop-down menu with added friction (you have to click through each one to see what the options are, rather than being able to open up the pull-down/drop-down menu and see all of them or at least a bunch of them).
Yours adds even more friction because the options aren’t visible AT ALL: how does the user know what to type? More friction is not necessarily bad: people often do use cycling links instead of drop-down menus in Twine. And for your interface, I could imagine a game that is entirely focused on figuring out what to type.
But in general it seems like you’re just copying a common problem in parser games: that people know what the game wants them to do but they have to “guess the verb” (or noun) to get the game to accept their input. And I don’t know why you’d want to do that.
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Overall, it seems to me like a mechanic that it might be interesting to experiment with, but one that you would want to validate with a successful game before committing to an entire platform built around it?
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I created a variable, which i set on a choice. How can i test against that variable, either for a conditional choice option or a conditional branch to a different node?