The Quern

Another good week; not stellar, but good.  I added polish, finished up Scene 3 and moved on to almost complete the rough cut of Scene 4.  Progress seems pretty steady, and since I deleted the Champions Online beta to avoid further distraction, I’ve been doing OK.

The major issue I ran into this week was documentation-related, actually.  One of the things I needed to do was to restrict operations against certain objects.  I have a viewscreen in the game, and generally you can only examine objects on it.  In some cases, however, you have people on the screen, and you can talk to them as well.

The Inform documentation describes rules of the form:

Instead of doing something other than examining, taking or dropping with the dagger: say "Don't fool around with that dagger. It's exceedingly sharp."

This type of example might work, or might not (I didn’t try this exact form) but I do know that the almost-identical version:

Instead of doing something other than examining or telling it about to the foozle: say "You know, it's not really there..."

…doesn’t work. And any conceivable variant of it that I could come up with failed as well. I was very frustrated until I found, buried deep in the examples, a solitary example of an alternate formulation:

Instead of doing something:
		if examining, continue the action;
		if searching, continue the action;
		if looking, continue the action;
		if asking Jenna to try doing something, continue the action;

This is a bit more cumbersome, but it does work and was adaptable to do what I needed.

The more Inform 7 I write, the more I’m convinced I really need to curl up with the entire user manual and printout of the Standard Rules and read them through several times to really get good at it. I think I’m going to be able to do well with implementing this game, but after I’m finished I’m definitely going to plow some effort into learning the intricacies before starting on my next project.