Raconteur problem

Authoring Choice-based IF
1

I’m trying out Raconteur, and even got it to run. (Tip for Ubuntu users: you might need to “sudo ln /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/local/bin/nodejs” and maybe also “sudo ln /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/local/bin/node” to get “gulp serve” to do anything.) But it’s throwing errors to me when I get to the second tutorial.

I’m using the code at the top of this post, and it throws

conteur-scaffold-master/game/main.coffee:51 optionText: 'Go right' ^ ParseError: unexpected :
at me. Any ideas? I may be missing the obvious, since I have no Javascript/Coffeescrip experience to speak of.

2

Whoops, there’s an error in that snippet of code; missing indentation. The third situation should be:

situation 'go_right',
  content: """
    The tunnel opens up into a wide chamber, dominated by a bright
    reflecting pool.
    """
  optionText: 'Go right'

If you just copy/pasted, I assume that’s your problem. Like a lot of compilers for languages with somewhat loose syntaxes that consider indentation, the CS compiler can throw errors that aren’t quite where the actual mistake was made.

3

Thanks!

4

Let me know if you hit any other problems.

5

I will! To be frank, I’m still in doubt about which authoring system to use for my choice-based game. When I didn’t get Raconteur to run, I started delving into ChoiceScript. It’s very easy to use and I made some nice progress yesterday. On the other hand, it doesn’t look as good as Undum (though it seems that Raconteur also looks a bit less good than standard Undum?) and the copyright license worries me a bit. So perhaps I’ll try writing the game’s prologue in ChoiceScript, then port it to Raconteur, and see which of the two works better for me. Hm.

6

Raconteur looks as good as you want it to; the CSS that comes with the scaffold is pared down from the default Undum one, but you can change it to look like anything you want, including using the CSS and images that come with Undum to get that exact look. I might at some point release some nicer-looking themes for people who don’t want to deal with Less/CSS themselves.

If you just want pure choice-based mechanics, then ChoiceScript might work better for you (though there is the licensing issue and other things). Raconteur/Undum lets you mix that with Twine-like hypertext play, however. There’s pretty much no other authoring system that can (easily) do everything I wanted to do in Mere Anarchy, which is why Raconteur exists.