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Advanced Tutorial -- Step 2: Add characters
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About characters
Interesting characters are probably the best way to liven up an adventure.
Adding a character is easy; it is very similar to adding an object. The only
difference is that you might want to allow the character to follow the player
around. Characters cannot otherwise do things on their own, as an artificially
intelligent creature might do. However, in practice, you can make it look like
characters have been up to things behind the scenes by carefully crafting your
commands.
This tutorial step will cover creating a mobile character. Note that
characters do not have to be mobile. You can treat characters like locations. Just
create a context for the character, and allow the player to move to and away from
the character, just like any other location. Almost everything in this step could
apply to either mobile or in-place characters.
Add a squirrel character
First, let's add a squirrel that follows our adventurer around the forest.
context
| command
| reply
| requirements
| changes
| squirrel
| look
| You see a large tree squirrel following you around.
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|
| squirrel
| pet the squirrel
| The squirrel wags its bushy tail and stares at you with love in its eyes.
Either that, or it's hungry.
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|
| squirrel
| feed the big nut to the squirrel
| The squirrel makes short work of the nut, and in gratitude, scampers off and
returns with a small nut made of gold.
| big nut
| ~big nut
golden nut
| squirrel
| kick the squirrel
| The squirrel avoids the blow and scampers off.
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| ~squirrel
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As with the knife, whenever the squirrel context is true, these commands will
be available. The "look" command will merge its reply in with the "look" for
any location. You can test the squirrel by setting "squirrel" to true in the
debugger.
Make the squirrel appear and disappear
To make the squirrel part of the story, however, somehow the squirrel context
needs to get set to true in the first place. This could be done in the first
rule of the adventure. You would need to add a change of "squirrel" to the first
rule make that work. In this case, once the squirrel runs away, there is no way
to get it back.
Alternatively, you could set "squirrel" to true whenever the adventurer climbs
the tree. In this case, the squirrel will reappear when the tree is climbed
even if it has been kicked before. More complicated logic (adding a "~squirrel
kicked" requirement to all four rules) would prevent the reappearance if desired.
Let's consider the squirrel to be a "tree squirrel" and in that case should
only follow the player around in the tree tops, vine bridge, and tree house. Add
"squirrel" as a change when the tree is climbed. Add "~squirrel" in three
command changes: when the forest is returned to by sliding down the tree, and in the
two commands that break the bridge. They should then look like this (ignoring
replies and requirements):
context
| command
| changes
| forest
| climb tree
| squirrel
| vine bridge
| cut the bridge
| ~squirrel
| vine bridge
| jump up and down
| ~squirrel
| tree top
| slide down the tree
| ~squirrel
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By the way, you can use the browser to determine the three rules that move to
the forest by clicking on the Move button in the rule editor panel and picking "forest" from the first list in
the browser (which is a list of all contexts that are moved to).
Add an interaction with the squirrel character
We don't yet have any way of getting a nut for the squirrel, or knowing we are
holding a golden nut. So add these five rules to create two nut objects:
context
| command
| reply
| requirements
| changes
| forest
| look
| You see a big nut on the ground.
| ~big nut
~golden nut
|
| forest
| take the big nut
| You take the big nut.
| ~big nut
~golden nut
| big nut
| big nut
| inventory
| You are carrying a big nut.
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|
| golden nut
| inventory
| You are carrying a golden nut.
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| golden nut
| examine the golden nut
| This seems to be a missing part from some bolt on a mechanical device
somewhere.
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Note that we had to add an extra requirement of "~golden nut" to prevent the
big nut from reappearing after it is fed to the squirrel. Now we have created a
story which involves giving the squirrel something and getting something in
return.
Also, any rules with a "look" command created that are after the squirrel
rules in the list of rule will say their replies after the squirrel rules do. To
control this, you may want to later move the squirrel rules lower in the table.
This will make the squirrel “look” reply appear later. This will only be an issue if the squirrel could appear
in those other locations.
Test the story
Test the interaction with your squirrel using the player window.
About characters and variation
If we wanted the squirrel to appear only every third time the tree was
climbed, we could create three "climb a tree" commands. Only one of these three rules
would have a change to make "squirrel" true. We would use requirements and
changes and other variables to make sure only one of these three commands was
available in the forest at one time -- as a sequence. Adding a sequence of commands
will be covered in a later step. The same kind of idea could be used to
seemingly randomly affect the mood of a character, or what the character has been up
to, and so forth.
The next step will describe how to add characters that converse with the
player.
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