Duh! I’m not too bright and sometimes I feel as if my hat is too tight.
I am trying to figure out a way to do the following:
My character is at the bottom of a grave, and I want him/her to be able to touch the north face and the south face of the grave with the palms of his hands and the bottoms of his feet. Only I can’t figure out a way to tell Inform that the grave has four faces, in each of the cardinal directions.
What do I do beyond getting a hat that fits better?
Is the grave a room or a container? If the grave is a room you could probably do something like:
The north face is scenery in the Grave. The south face is scenery in the Grave. The west face is scenery in the Grave. The east face is scenery in the Grave.(“Scenery” so you don’t wind up with “You can see a north face etc. here.”)
If it’s a container you could say:
The grave is an enterable container. A north face is part of the grave. A south face is part of the grave.[etc.]or you might be able to do that all in one declaration, “A north face, a south face, a west face, and an east face are part of the grave.”
However! How do you envision the player interacting with this? If you want them to type “touch south face with bottoms of feet” that doesn’t seem like a syntax anyone will ever be able to guess. Even having the player do anything with the south face will require very very heavy hinting that they’re supposed to do something with the south face; if the south face of the grave isn’t mentioned then most experienced IF players won’t expect to have to deal with it. So you might want to think about this puzzle design before you implement it.
Also I would expect that if I were touching the south face with my feet then my hands would be touching the east/west faces, though this would depend on how I’d been laid out I guess and whether the grave was unusually wide.
Thanks for the reply. Have you seen these people who climb walls – or bricked-in alcoves, whatever – backwards, their hands pressing against one wall and their feet pressing against the other? That’s the effect I want to create.
This is interesting to me because I’ve actually tackled this problem in a WIP.
Climbing up the opposite sides of the grave is not an unreasonable idea if you think about it in a movie, but mattw is absolutely right that it will be hard for people to figure out what commands to enter in order to make it happen.
You might be able to cue it with something like this:
[spoiler]>up
You try to scrabble up the side of the grave, but the dirt is too loose and you fall back down.
Maybe if you pushed with your hands and feet, you could climb out.
climb out
(the north face)
You try to scrabble up the north face of the grave, but the dirt is too loose and you fall back down.
Maybe if you braced your hands against one side of the grave, and braced your feet against the opposite side…
brace hands against grave
(the north face)
You set your hands against the north face of the grave. Now, if you just brace your feet, you’ll be ready to go.
brace feet against grave
Your hands are already braced against the north face. You’ll need to brace your feet against the opposite face.
brace feet against south face
(…etc)[/spoiler]
…but the end effect here is that it isn’t really a puzzle, because you need to cue the solution so hard (in order to get the player to type the right commands) that you circumvent the puzzle.
You may have a great idea for cueing the player - and if so, that’s great!
However, here’s the solution I used (modified for your context).
>up
You brace your hands against the north face of the grave, brace your feet against the south face of the grave, and inch your way up the wall. Your feet occasionally slip on the dirt, producing a few heart-pounding moments, but eventually you reach the top and heave yourself over the side.
From a narrative perspective, this provides exactly the effect you wanted, but it circumvents all the guess-the-verb frustration, along with a whole lot of coding.
Thanks so much! I may try it, or I may try another solution, but thanks very much all the same.