In the story I’m trying to write, at the start of the game the concept of “seeing” hasn’t been introduced yet. Mechanically it’s still there, but the player would “sense” things somehow, so it’s really just a language thing. Is there a reasonably easy way to change the “You can/can’t see here” responses and bits of room descriptions to something with a different verb?
Changing the standard responses is straightforward.
The easiest way to get a complete list of the standard responses is to type “responses all” at the in-game prompt in Inform. (Make sure you haven’t already changed any of them first.) Copy the resulting text dump into a file which you can refer to while working.
For example, you’ll see that it contains these lines near the top:
you-can-also-see rule response (A): "[We] "
you-can-also-see rule response (B): "On [the domain] [we] "
you-can-also-see rule response (C): "In [the domain] [we] "
you-can-also-see rule response (D): "[regarding the player][can] also see "
you-can-also-see rule response (E): "[regarding the player][can] see "
you-can-also-see rule response (F): " here"
This is what generates lines like “You can see whatever here.” You can say
The you-can-also-see rule response (D) is "[regarding the player][can] also sense ". The you-can-also-see rule response (E) is "[regarding the player][can] sense "
and it will be so.
But note that you can’t just replace “see” with “sense” blindly because sometimes the “seer” is the parser, not the player (e.g. “You seem to want to talk to someone, but I can’t see whom.”) Also, if your game contains darkness, you’ll need to find a sensible way of dealing with that.
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Thanks! That looks just about perfect.
I’ll need to change the response during the game, but some “to say” stuff that depends on scenes should make that straightforward. I don’t think I’ll have darkness.
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