There are graphical computer games where you can use a hallucinant drug, and then everything changes colour or starts wobbling or whatever for a minute or so. Is something similar possible in Inform 7? Is there a method for interfering with the output stream and doing something with random colour of random character or random capitalisation, or anything like that? Probably not without delving into Inform 6, I guess?
Any tips – including: ‘this is too difficult, forget about it’ – welcome!
The Glulx filter I/O system could be useful for this. You provide a function to be called for every character of output, which could randomize the capitalization or style and then print it by calling Glk.
This sort of thing calls for Vorple. CSS can do these tricks fairly naturally.
Or mathbrush’s Bisquixe: B.J. Best wrote a fairly extensive beginner’s guide post for it…
Seconding one of the CSS options (Vorple or Bisquixe). Basic Glulx has very limited styling support, so you could mess with capitalization or switch between a small number of colors, but not really anything beyond that. CSS can do anything—which means you can find options that look trippy without being unreadable.
Thanks! This is very minor part of a game, and something like capitalisation might actually be enough – I’m a little wary of requiring a special interpreter. (I usually play all my games in Gargoyle myself.) But I’ll take a look at the options!
For some kinds of text transformation, it’s useful to know about @setiosys in Glulx as in:
I think that thanks to the unboxing service, more and more players are engaging with web play.
The skill floor for bisquixe is fairly low (that’s why I can use it!), so I’ve gotten in the habit of releasing games in both formats (web and GBLORB).
You’re limited with Glk to 11 pre specified styles. You could set them up to allow you to randomly switch between bold and italics (you’d actually only need one user style for bold and italic together.) You could also switch between proportional and fixed width fonts. With the Gargoyle extension functions you could then also set a random colour and switch reverse mode on or off.
But with Glk once a character has been printed it’s styles cannot be changed, so they can’t do any further ‘wobbles’. However you could clear the screen and reprint it. For a short message that could be an effective effect.
But as others have said, to have complete control over it, or to change any existing text, you’d need Vorple or Bisquixe.
I’ve been experimenting with (and this is a patchwork experiment y’all) having an Inform 7 game running in Parchment talk to an external CSS. I put it into this game sample and also experimenting with t3xt th4t 5t4rts t00 L0ok we1rd.
A script watches the game text for room names. When you walk into a new room, it detects the zone change and swaps the entire color palette. The transition is smooth, colors fade over about a second rather than snapping. Nicely moody.
Note this also has sound built into the Story file.
