>>38382My contemplations on interactive fiction have lead me to design a text-centric expression language, that's a bastard child of Lisp and SNOBOL. Maybe i will get the interpreter to a presentable state soon. Here is an example of what the code might look like.
Room :
description : You see a $(room.color) room. ;
color : black ;
;
Verbs :
x examine : *.description ;
look : $verbs.x(location) ;
go move :
location:*;
if not *.visited then
room:visited;
$verbs.x(room)
end if
;
;
while input : $read-line() loop
if verbs.$first(input) then
$apply(verbs.$first(input), $rest(input))
else
I don't know how to $first(input).
end if
end loopOrdinary strings yield themselves, whitespace automatically concatenates expressions into a list (yielding the concatenated string in single value contexts), there is a ':' operator for setting values (yielding an empty string), a '.' search operator, ';' ends a list and function calls are prefixed with '$' (that are called by setting * to the argument list).
Otherwise i think you should choose whatever you're most comfortable with. I personally don't like python, but it's certainly a well-supported choice, also letting you interface with C if you're into that. Just try not to hardcode presentation logic, like writing messages directly to stdout. Here is a tutorial on how to make simple terminal interfaces
https://xn--rpa.cc/irl/term.htmlHow do you feel about the technical details of DoL and what exactly do you think makes the game good? I'm sometimes puzzled as to *why* all of it works. Here are some of my complaints:
<The skill system is structured so you don't really want to miss out on some things.School bonuses are very impactful and to be fair it's a huge area, but overall i think it takes up too much time. Skullduggery is needed for a lot of useful for a lot of situations and some soft resets, yet it's grindy af from the beginning.
<Prostitution and skullduggery are your only viable means of making money early.Every other path requires an upfront investment or is even more gri
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