 |
| Chill: Black Morn manor board game. The map reminds me of Cragne Manor. |
Andrew Plotkin maintains a nice webpage hosting Cragne Manor Inform source code files that have been shared publicly by their authors. The other day I sent him my 30k-word source for room M1F5, The Music Room, so it can now be downloaded from or viewed (in easy-to-read format) on the page. Obviously, the source is completely spoilery for the location. A few observations on it:
- I opened ten other sources at random and I guess one thing I can say about mine is it appears to be the most commented of the sources. This will help if you want to try to follow it much, because the room transforms amongst eight different guises during play. The phrases "wadrick-pack-the-new-room" and "wadrick-unpack-the-old-room" teleport people and objects in and out as the player moves through the different sub-rooms.
- There are thirteen rules in the source intercepting all the actions (I could find!) that a player can use to launch a vital object into a room at a vital moment in order to stay alive.
- There's also a reasonable amount of code (in "Section - Wider world rules") diverting/suppressing every alternate path to conversation. Tons of paths had been added by a coordinators-supplied conversation extension that may be great in its own right, but which I recall they ultimately regretted adding, because it created so many potholes for authors. My problem was that with the extension in place, Inform constantly harped on the topic of the vomit object I'd created. If someone was allowed to type ASK in my room, the game would immediately print "(about the vomit)", and as funny as that was for a few minutes, it was more genuinely an annoyance. So I moved aggressively on the whole issue.
