Hi everyone,
First off, I’m a newbie, new to Inform, new to IF. I’ve been playing around with a project on my own for a few months, feeling my way through problems as I cross them. I love it and this is my first foray into public forums-- so, how do you do.
I’m working on a fictionalized version of my real world travels, which is captured in actual paper journals. I want to use my real life journal entries as a starting point, then edit/fictionalize them as needed. I have many, many pages to transcribe from paper into IF. Then, I want to insert these journal entries as text in certain parts of the story. I’ve mapped out the world roughly (rooms and regions) and I’d like to trigger spontaneous journal entries from time to time throughout the story. That is, at certain times, the player is told that they stop what they are doing to write in their journal (my choice, not theirs) and that the journal entry says such-and-such (my text, not theirs).
Here is my approach so far:
Because I am converting a bunch of real world text that I want to edit later, I don’t want to sprinkle the journal entries throughout the story, within rooms or scenes. Therefore, I created Table of Journal Entries (which I can create by inserting row/column tags into my transcribed journals), from which I can grab entries as needed.
Right now, it looks like this:
Table of Journal Entries
Entry ID Journal Entry
"AOM1" "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque dui dolor, lacinia ut tempor sit amet, euismod eu sem. [line break]Praesent volutpat commodo iaculis. Sed fermentum, purus eleifend posuere interdum, est eros maximus nibh, pulvinar aliquet magna erat a arcu.[paragraph break]"
"YH1" "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque dui dolor, lacinia ut tempor sit amet, euismod eu sem. [line break]Praesent volutpat commodo iaculis. Sed fermentum, purus eleifend posuere interdum, est eros maximus nibh, pulvinar aliquet magna erat a arcu.[paragraph break]"
The Entry ID is just an internal ID that I’ll recognize as referring to a room (YH1 is the first entry in room YH). I’m not using date/time because I don’t think flow of time will be that strict and it’s the location that counts.
The table is hard to read in Inform7 when entries are long, but I don’t know another way to centralize the content transcribed from Word.
For triggering journal entries, my current approach it to:
- Define “journaling” as an activity that involves saying the “[Journal Entry corresponding to an Entry ID of Entry ID in the Table of Journal Entries]”.
- Use rules in the appropriate rooms to set the Entry ID and determine when to trigger Journaling (after so many turns, etc).
I’m not including exact code here because first I wonder if this is a good approach at all.
So I’m looking for feedback/ideas about:
- How to transcribe from journals in Word (etc) into Inform7 and then edit/maintain content centrally. Is a table the best/only way?
- How to insert journal entries throughout my story. Is there a better way than my “every turn in room check to trigger activity” approach?
Thanks so much!
Jason