Wednesday, January 11, 2006
New rooms, new ideas
Just added some new rooms to the spellcasting experiment. Originally thought I'd add more spellcasting methods, but they aren't at a plug-and-play level. I might see if I can adjust that sometime to more quickly allow new commands, although it might require rewriting significant parts of the code. Ah well, it's really not that great as it stands. For the time being though, I suppose I'll continue to push it and see if it ends up with anything interesting.
Perhaps after a few more short introductory expansions to this build, I could actually see if I can devise a complex puzzle, instead of casting your newest spell at a new object.
An idea that occurred to me was to make the limit of items the player can carry much smaller - perhaps three - and force the player to go out and solve a puzzle, armed only with three items, which in this case will certainly be different books (since I haven't really added anything else). On the other hand, this makes it even more pointless to memorize things. Perhaps, should I rewrite this, I'll just let the player cast spells from any book s/he is holding, and do away with the code I've added to the Read function. Another idea I had considered adding to this style of challenge would let me easily control what manipulations the player is and isn't capable of - by requiring certain items to perform certain manipulations, the player wouldn't learn them from some process I had not yet determined, but rather, to perform some manipulation other than normal casting, they would require a specific item. This would mean a player could attempt to tackle a puzzle with either a variety of different energies, or a variety of things that could be done with a single energy, or some compromise of both. Somehow it seems like it would take away from the environment of an IF game, but it would at least create a simple environment of its own. The primary feature I see with puzzles like this would be the greatly increased replayability over a standard IF program. So long as I could create situations with multiple solutions, it would not be as limited as a standard adventure game, which once finished, is often pointless to resume.
Anyway, I'll see how far I can push this build, but I may sometime rebuild it entirely to see if I could make it any smoother for expansion, and start some additional programs to highlight parts of the code for the main project.
Perhaps after a few more short introductory expansions to this build, I could actually see if I can devise a complex puzzle, instead of casting your newest spell at a new object.
An idea that occurred to me was to make the limit of items the player can carry much smaller - perhaps three - and force the player to go out and solve a puzzle, armed only with three items, which in this case will certainly be different books (since I haven't really added anything else). On the other hand, this makes it even more pointless to memorize things. Perhaps, should I rewrite this, I'll just let the player cast spells from any book s/he is holding, and do away with the code I've added to the Read function. Another idea I had considered adding to this style of challenge would let me easily control what manipulations the player is and isn't capable of - by requiring certain items to perform certain manipulations, the player wouldn't learn them from some process I had not yet determined, but rather, to perform some manipulation other than normal casting, they would require a specific item. This would mean a player could attempt to tackle a puzzle with either a variety of different energies, or a variety of things that could be done with a single energy, or some compromise of both. Somehow it seems like it would take away from the environment of an IF game, but it would at least create a simple environment of its own. The primary feature I see with puzzles like this would be the greatly increased replayability over a standard IF program. So long as I could create situations with multiple solutions, it would not be as limited as a standard adventure game, which once finished, is often pointless to resume.
Anyway, I'll see how far I can push this build, but I may sometime rebuild it entirely to see if I could make it any smoother for expansion, and start some additional programs to highlight parts of the code for the main project.
# posted by Blake @ 10:59 PM 
