Three Dollar Quill

Today we watched Them!, which is some pretty good 50s schlock. Maybe we should see what else is out there in terms of movies named after pronouns.

Anyway, I later tried some more to adapt Ink's code, and I'm now heavily suspecting that I'm going to need to try prototyping something that follows the very high-level interface, and work with that a bit until it makes sense to me, because I don't really use programming languages that treat field access like C# does.

I'll try and sketch out some of the ideas I have here.

At a very abstract level, a Story can be serialized or deserialized. It can be in a state where it can produce lines of text, or choices, or it can be ready to follow a choice.

Now, following a choice will add lines of text. (Last I checked, in the reference implementation, none of the text is saved, so procedural text gets regenerated. I'll check that now. Yep, still a footgun.)

I'm going to sketch some of this on paper.

Okay, I've got a very informal state machine diagram that represents an extremely opinionated system without many external capabilities. Seems like a good target for prototyping.

And now I've got a separate file for prototyping this stuff, and it's got some code in it.

I guess the next thing to work on is the serialization and deserialization, because it's not really an implementation of Ink if it can't work with the save format.

Although... I also need to change around the interface to reflect the different responsibilities I'm giving different parts of the system.

Good night.