News You Can Bruise for 2002 May 23 (entry 3)

Thu May 23 2002 21:26: The tricky game feature now works, not perfectly, but well enough that I can come back to it later when I'm in the mood for rewriting and debugging. For a while today I despaired, multiplying beyond count all the possibilities I would have to support. Not only would it be impossible for me to implement all the cases, there would be too many slightly different options for the player to specify in text exactly what it was they wanted to do.

Then I calmed down. Between the start of the game and the activation of the feature, the player must make three lateral thinking breakthroughs, and by the time they do so there's no longer any point in playing dumb and pretending you don't know what they're trying to do. Much better to reward them by making it easy to express the actions that, by the time they get to it, will be obvious to them.

And, of course, any other useless cases implied by the small subset of useful cases can be dealt with by the game designer's favorite trick: the arbitrary "you can't/don't want to do that" restriction.