Some thoughts about Aventure 2 now that it’s online

Tada ! Adventure 2 is now online ! See the link at the end of this post. This time I beat my old problem of starting things without ever finishing them. With this radical (for me !) choice of not writing my own engine, but using an existing one (here Spip, my favorite CMS), I was able to reach all my objectives :

• a game engine allowing me to create rooms, link them, and offer a non-linear story to the player
• a game that can be built and improved as time goes, following my availability
• an editor that works with a Smartphone

Using a 3rd party system I had to accept some limitations around which I will work for the game. Two of them are however a real pain at this point :

Incoming link to rooms

In a given room, the menu listing the links to the next possible rooms, take each link from the content of the next room. This means the text is always the same. This is not practical- normally you want the link between two rooms itself to contain the text. Here is an example :

Room 1 : treasure room. Everything glitters here. But in the back, you see a plain wooden door.

> I open the door —>Room 3

Room 2 : throne room. It’s really an impressive throne, and look at those intricate curtains ! Actually, isn’t that an opening behind the curtain ?

> I check the opening —>Room 3

Room 3 : the janitor room. Behind the door, you find a cupboard with some brooms.

In the current version Room 1 and Room 2 can not both point towards Room 3 because their descriptions of how to reach Room 3 differ. Room3 can only contain either "I open the door" or "I check the opening".

There is a workaround, however it can be used only once per room, which limits its usefulness.

The beginning of a room’s description

I did not think about that in DiaVN either, but it would be great to be able to have the room’s introductory text differ depending on where the player comes from. In the example above, Room 3 says "you open the door" which matches coming from Room 1, but not from Room 2.

Would it be possible to create some "conditional text" using Spip that enables that ? I will check...