Isekai dev diary

Authoring Story Research and Design
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I’m sure old-timers have their eyes wide open, knowing my past strict, NK-grade secrecy about WIP, and that I openly gives a dev diary on my major WIP, the one whose has also contents more amenable in EU than US (of course, I reserve to open a parallel diary in the appropriate debate…)

Currently I’m slowly proceeding, even by my standards, because of a very woung meower needing constant watching (and cleansing the mess from her playing around…) but aside the story research, I have already given many interesting TADS3 trickery.

(of course, in due proceedings, there WILL be spoilers, so you’re forewarned !)

[site technical note, blur spoilers seems incompatible with preformatted text… the admins can be look on this serious issue ? ]

On story research proper, I’m assessing the title itself; I have some serious doubts on naming an IF after a genre; this can be easily seen as REALLY preposterous, because the very first IF gives its name to a genre… opinions ?

On trickery, I should give out this snippet, whose is a very useful debug item:
(SPOILERS BELOW; see the site technical note above)

// an "instrument panel" for monitoring vars
// of course, to be removed in the released game, after converting the
// output in "analog format" for usage in X myself (spiritual)

knoscroll: Thing 'Scroll of Knowledge; knowledge; scroll' @etuye
 "this is not a mere scroll: is the Scroll of Knowledge, an impish tool for 
monitoring the state of your progress in knowledge & lore"

// hope that with tabs, lines remain <78... and that works under a3lite...
readDesc = "\t\t<b>State of Knowledge variables and flags:</b>\n
\t\t\tVARIABLES:\n
level of wondering about yourself: <<etuye.wonder>>\t
knowledge about this new body: <<etuye.bodykno>>\n
(for testers: if these two vars changes, please X YOURSELF)\n
knowledge about your personal life: <<etuye.perskno>>\t
level of recovered literacy: <<etuye.alfakno>>\n
(if the literacy level raise, please try to read again readables...)\n
level of realisation of your feelings toward Azuj & Miyai: <<etuye.luvkno>>\n
level of, ehm... your audacity toward your new body: <<etuye.audax>>\b
\t\t\tFLAGS: (T = True, N = Nil)\n
Discovered infravision: <<etuye.infrakno? "T" : "N">>\t
Discovered sound gamut:  <<etuye.gamutkno? "T" : "N">>\n
Discovered sharp vision: <<etuye.sharpkno? "T" : "N">>\n
Discovered the marriage: <<etuye.relkno? "T" : "N">>\t
Discovered being a Magi: <<etuye.magikno? "T" : "N">>\n
";

whose usefulness as debug tool is very obvious…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Having cited it elsewhere, I use this rather simple trick for debugging the pair of NPCs whose enters the stage later, for easing the testing of the interaction:

azuj : Actor 
'Azuj; petite winged; demon daemon atuzejiki azuj spouse wife soulmate; her'
@corrN // temp; ease the debug of non-scenic azuj

the second line is the simple trick: all I need for test release, and hopefully someday the actual release is commenting out the second line, whose place her in off-stage (in my testing builds, when testing the actual staging of Azuj, she’s also automatically moved her from the convenient location nearby the starting location, together setting the appropriate actor state, so no risk of the disastrous “duplicate actor” bug; moving from another loc or from nil is basically the same thing; actor.moveInto(loc) IS a very powerful and useful method…)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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So is this in TADS 3? It looks interesting; this seems like a good way to learn more about the code, by following along

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yea, brian, Indeed I’m discovering not few interesting things, not few already reported in the TADS debate… :slight_smile:

Indeed here I will present and/or discuss not only design/story development, but also story-specific coding :wink:

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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I understand the vibe of naming a work of fiction after a genre or trope. Usually that sets up the expectation that you are either experiencing a well-researched example of said genre, hitting all the expected tropes in a potentially fan-service manner, or the work is potentially commenting on, satirizing, parodying or stretching and breaking the tropes in a way that is hopefully meta and surprising to people who understand the genre tropes.

Other examples of this happen in books and movies:

Pulp Fiction was an original story named after a type of series novels that relished the idea of crime thrillers and how meandering extended plots could be if you spent time in the worlds of each of these characters and how they intersected, including “everyday minor” life and death situations that occurred regularly.

Peter Straub’s Ghost Story is more the reminiscing kind of tale in which a club of older men gather to tell each other ghost stories they’ve created but all are haunted in by the spirit of the same person they share acquaintance with who might be coming back after them for revenge.

Grindhouse is a movie that gives the experience of cinema going during the era of middling-quality grindhouse/exploitation movies for a double feature, along with period concession stand ads and badly-cut (satirical) trailers which are often missing scenes, sometimes with terrible sound quality when you had theater workers assembling trailer reels manually and splicing movies back together with razor and tape in the booth sometimes randomly when projectors would get stuck, burn and break the film and they’d have to repair it. It’s a vibe.

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I admit that there’s major isekai tropes, e.g. the “figuring out the written language ASAP” trope IS a major, multi-stage puzzle, and that, ahem, indeed there’s fanservice, but the major trope, learning the uses and costumes of a different world is here (you remember my debate about “knowledge and lore as treasures ?”)… but remains the preposterous justapoxition with Adventure… for now the name remains, but I’m exploring alternatives.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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