I specifically stopped partway through Time Swap so I could experience it properly once the mechanic was fixed, but my take was that the Age of Chivalry is to the Feudal Age as the Hyborian Age is to the Bronze Age. That is, it’s the Don Quixote vision of feudalism, not the historians’ view.
This is a very good design point! If a verb will never be useful, it can sometimes be better (imo) to disable it entirely—that way the player won’t have the wrong expectations. A lackluster implementation of a verb can be worse than no implementation at all.
One of my IFComp WIPs has no “examine” verb at all and it’s a fun challenge to write parser IF without it.
About naming of the ages… I have to admit that “feudal” might be a bit confusing. In my original design notes I had naming like (see also the bad quality pic I took of my handwriting, the top left sheet lists the ages in the left column.):
Time Period
Original Age
Letter
Current Age
Letter
2000 AD
London Age
L
Modern Age
M
1600 AD
Samurai Age
S
Feudal Age
F
500 AD
Arthurian Age
A
Chivalry Age
C
1200 BC
Greek Age
G
Greek Age
G
10000 BC
Hyborian Age
H
Hyborian Age
H
I wanted to implement the travel command (later called transfer, but I think maybe travel is a better verb) like:
<SYNTAX TRAVEL OBJECT = V-TRAVEL>
<SYNONYM TRAVEL T>
>TRAVEL GREEK
or
>T G
And then I subsequently created an OBJECT for each age, so the player could refer to it by either the full name or its abbreviation. Except it didn’t work for the original abbreviations for obvious reasons I totally overlooked (S is SOUTH, and A is an article). And OTHER verbs could also accept such objects, which messed up the whole thing (In Inform 7 I would have used a TOPIC but for me it was not clear from the ZIL documentation what the equivalent for that would be. I did find references to NUMBER as a token, so I used that instead and removed the object-oriented approach of identifying ages).
Sooo I am wondering, would Arthurian / Samurai age be better to avoid the confusion? I think “Modern” is still preferable to “London” because London has been around for quite some time (as Londinium, 50 AD).
As for the EXAMINE command, I had plans… for the things the NPCs were wearing or carrying. That’s why I added them, but time ran out before I could actually do something with them.
FWIW, I think the traditional Infocom way to do it would be to either make an object for each age, and block everything except travel in their ACTION routines, or come up with some kind of custom parser hack.
Recent versions of ZILF support TOPIC in verb syntaxes, which Advent uses for its teleportation system.
Though I only found 20 minutes for this battle, I am now very much looking forward to play both games thoroughly. Congratulations to Max Fog - creating a fairly polished game in 5 days in such an old dialect is quite impressive. And also congratulations to the brave Lancelot for taking on the challenge despite never having written a game in ZIL. I look forward to see how the disabled command will work in the final version
