Hey All-
So I was editing my game, and suddenly, a section of it that I did not change and that has always works fine causes a failed translation. I put it in brackets, turning it green (so not part of the programming, right?). And even though it’s green text in brackets, the translation is STILL FAILING due to that.
The error message highlights the green bracketed text and tells me:
Problem. You wrote ‘" The description of the bar is " A heavy wooden bar, with a heart design carved into it, held by a metal bracket on either side of the yellow door’ : but assertions about the initial state of play must be given in the present tense, so ‘The cat is in the basket’ is fine but not ‘The cat has been in the basket’. Time is presumed to start only when the game begins, so there is no anterior state which we can speak of.
What on earth? I have scoured those lines, and there is no past tense. And I haven’t changed it at all and it was working like a charm. And it’s really bugging me that the program is picking these lines up even when they should be invisible. All other bracketed green text does not now and never has thrown an error.
Look for something having absolutely nothing to do with that message that might be off in the line directly above it (or maybe a few lines). Imbalanced brackets, maybe? Or missing semicolon? I’d consider it plausible that something about your particular code could be confusing the editor enough to improperly syntax-highlight it.
You are a genius. It was indeed about 10 lines above it- an extra quotation mark left over from a delete that, weirdly, had not thrown the text coloration out of whack, which is scary, because I rely heavily on text coloration to tell me when I’ve oopsed quotation marks.
Good to know that can happen. I was starting to think something was wrong with my color vision.
As always, thanks a million for the sound advice.