(This is for inform 7, so putting it here, but maybe should be in the tools category?)
Howdy, I had a lot of trouble with Inform 7’s natural language.
While this is very readable, it’s very….input-able?
Foyer of the Opera House is a room. "You are standing in a spacious hall,
splendidly decorated in red and gold, with glittering chandeliers overhead.
The entrance from the street is to the north, and there are doorways south and west."
Instead of going north in the Foyer, say "You've only just arrived, and besides,
the weather outside seems to be getting worse."
While this isn’t readable, I can grok typing it in:
Object foyer "Foyer of the Opera House"
with description
"You are standing in a spacious hall, splendidly decorated in red
and gold, with glittering chandeliers overhead. The entrance from
the street is to the north, and there are doorways south and west.",
s_to bar,
w_to cloakroom,
n_to
"You've only just arrived, and besides, the weather outside
seems to be getting worse.",
has light;
But you learn by doing, but I’ve also been working on my game, and have a map, item layout, etc. So was thinking if I can get the bones in, I can add in the sinewy puzzles, bloody NPCs, and some-other-body-metaphor stuff later. But then I did want it to do Cloak of Darkness, so lots of feature creep, but today I said f it and added global variables (a sin for programming I believe) but let me fix the logic stuff. Figured i might as well release it if it helps anyone else.
You can add verbs, link them to existing verbs (Cloak has hang → put on) and set up some very basic NPC stuff. I really wouldn’t rec using the puzzle nodes much, but again, wanted to do Cloak.
The JSON for cloak and the code for Impsest is here and you can mess with it on itch as well
CloakOfDarkness - Google Drive
https://dayeight.itch.io/impsest
(It’s called Impsest as play on palimpsest, contains the word imp, and sounds a little dirty?)