So, I’m writing a basic game for my first time. My player wakes up one a raft in the middle of the ocean with nothing but an oar. I want the player to be able to padding [direction] because off in the distance he can see a small dot that may be land.
[code]Paddling is an action applying to one room
Understand “paddle [direction]” as paddling[/code]
That is what I have, however it gives me the following error:
Problem. You wrote ‘Paddling is an action applying to one room’ : but an action can only apply to things or to kinds of value, for instance: ‘photographing is an action applying to one visible thing’.
So, what am I doing wrong here? I’d like to actually do two things when the player paddles north, first, change the description of the raft room. Secondly, decrement a counter that when it reaches zero will disable paddling because you will have reached land(I want the player to have to paddle several times). I also want to disable paddling east, west, or south, because that’d be the wrong way.
You cannot write “paddling is a thing applying to a room”. Like the compiler said, you can only do “paddling is an action applying to one thing” or “paddling is an action applying to nothing”.
Section 12.7 of the documentation explains it: “Also, note that if you invent an action which needs to apply to directions like “north” or “south”, you need to make this apply to visible things, because the object used inside Inform to represent the idea of “north” can be seen but not touched. So for understanding purposes, “visible thing” is understood as meaning any visible thing or direction: it’s more general than “thing”, not more specific.”
To make “paddle” work, write
Understand "paddle" as a mistake ("Please supply a direction.").
Another, possibly simpler, approach to the whole problem is to make a few rooms instead of a single “raft room” whose description you manually change. Then you would not need a paddle counter.
Ah, thanks for the help. I have everything mostly working now, however I don’t like the error message. When I try to paddle it says, “What do you want to paddle”. How can I change this to something like, “What direction would you like to paddle?”.
Thanks
EDIT: Nevermind, I didn’t realize you edited your post. thanks again