Turandot!

Added Opera, or the Undoing of Women to my reading list!

I thought I was fairly knowledgeable about opera, but I never heard of Turandot until this IFComp.

I see it that it played at the Lyric Opera of Chicago just last year. I’ll catch it the next time it’s in town. It looks wondrous. And I’ll brag to everyone sitting around me that I played an interactive version of the libretto. :grin:

Thinking back on the operas I’ve seen, a lot of them would make good IF games.

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My dream: people who have played the game, watching the opera and thinking to themselves that Puccini sure took a lot of liberties with the story. (“I mean, I understand why they wouldn’t want a crocodile down in the orchestra pit, but some of the other omissions…”)

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I’ve also written a review of this wonderful game on my blog.

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Since at least three reviewers have now commented favourably on the early choice where all your choices are “yes”, it is perhaps amusing to point out that I actually had to ‘hack’ ChoiceScript a bit to make this possible. ChoiceScript automatically assumes that you don’t want to offer a player identical choices, and throws a fatal error when you do! (Or at least it did back when I wrote the first version of the prologue.) So the code for this moment of the game is the following:

*temp choice1 "Yes."
*temp choice2 "Yes."

*fake_choice
  #"Yes."
  #"${choice1}"
  #"${choice2}"

Not a difficult workaround, of course, but I’m glad I did it. :slight_smile:

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could you use spaces after the word? That’s my default when i want two bits of text to look the same

I don’t think so, although I’m not one hundred percent sure. Note that the quotation marks in the choice options are part of the text to be printed, so the trailing space would come after the last quotation mark and thus at least be invisible to the eye… Not sure whether they might not get ignored by ChoiceScript too.

To paraphrase a famous game designer: no one minds being railroaded if the train goes straight to Awesometown.

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