[projectaon] Re: gamebook.js - an IF-style gamebook engine (featuring FotW)
- From: Chris Neilson <crusty.chris@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2013 09:32:12 +1300
On 18/01/13 04:29, Christian Jauvin wrote:
Hi Chris,
Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate!
I'd be happy to host my files on Project Aon.. is there a particular
process I should go through?
Yeah I believe Jon just needs to set you up with a staff account, which
then allows you to upload files.
I havent heard much from anyone in a while - maybe theyre all still on
holiday? They usually respond quite quickly. Just give the others some
time and Im sure theyll surface eventually :)
But I guess the question would also be:
is it worth it? Because at this point, it doesn't seem to be of a
great interest to the LW community.
Even though youve designed this with LW in mind, theres no reason that
your code cannot be used for other gamebooks - or even to allow others
to make their own gamebooks. I wouldnt necessarily limit yourself in
that respect (I guess Im saying just because youre not seeing any
interest in the LW community doesnt mean that someone wouldnt find it
interesting).
Personally I think its a really intriguing take on playing the books and
Im really interested in seeing it develop. One of the major "flaws" with
every other implementations is that you need some external (pen and
paper, a separate web page etc) way of recording many things like items
collected, skills chosen, even Random Number Generation. Your system
already takes care of RNG, it would be fairly trivial to add a section
at the start to choose skills/starting items, initial stat generation
could easily be done automatically as well, saving this information to a
file would provide a way of saving your place in an adventure (ie to
continue later) and continuing your character in a later adventure.
I guess its a call you ultimately have to make. My suggestion (if you
are not already doing so) would be to modify your code so that it either
a) works with the Project Aon XML files directly (so you dont have to
generate your own JSON ones)
b) provides a parser to convert the PA XML files into your JSON files
then that way you dont have to spend as much time on the actual
importing of the text (if thats your major concern) - you could focus on
the actual parsing engine.
One of the biggest challenges that I think youd face would be in regards
to the lack of options you actually have in the gamebooks. Take section
160 as an example, you only have the option of demonstrating 5 of your
skills and given the text its not immediately obvious you can choose not
to demonstrate anything (unless you type hint first). Quite often my
first thought in text adventures is to "look at ..." which quite often
you cannot do in LW. I guess you could either display the hint
automatically whenever the user types in something nonsensical (eg jump)
or prompt for/display a hint after 3/4 failed attempts (combats in
particular are annoying when you have an evade option as it just sits at
the prompt ... wtf? i have an option here? ... i realise you havent
implemented combat yet but i still needed to use a hint to work out why
it was waiting for input from me).
My suggestion would be to take it as far as you can be bothered. If you
want encouragement then i will provide some for as long as I can be
bothered :)
As long as you release your code open source (and leave the copyrighted
stuff on PA of course) someone else can take all the work youve done and
build on it later (when they can be bothered).
As for the bug you mentioned, I was aware of it, but you made me
realize that I had to fix it, because it's annoying. I discovered that
it's linked to the way Chrome handles keypress events, because on
other browsers it seemed to work. I fixed it (should work now on
Chrome)
ah yes, it is indeed fixed (and i was using chrome).
but I also discovered another scrolling problem with Firefox
(at least the Linux version), for which I couldn't find a fix. If
someone has a clue, please drop me a line.
Christian
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