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Get help from the experts on variables, scripts, items, and other scary things.

First time troubles

one year ago
in Several branches in my game I'd like to give my players a chance to name themselves, as well as the possibility to lie about that name and come clean later.

How can I do that in a newbie friendly way?

Additionally, how would I add and use weapons/armor? The explanations for the variables kind of lost me as to how to actually use them. Or set them up as id like them.

First time troubles

one year ago
The way to do all of this is with variables, you're going to need to get a handle on those if you want to do an RPG style game. There's not a "newbie friendly" way to enter names or do combat because that's not really what the editor was intended for, even if the means are there to put something like that together.

A variable is just a labeled box that you assign a number to, and then tell the game to check for that number. Until you get the hang of how to use them to enhance a game you may want to avoid projects that focus on them so heavily. The writing and branching are always going to be the things people are looking at first and foremost anyway.

First time troubles

one year ago

For more info on Mizal's suggestions, here's the articles pages https://chooseyourstory.com/help

First time troubles

one year ago

As Mizal said, you can't do any of that in a newbie-friendly way.

What I'd suggest with the name thing is to cut it if you can. Nobody on this site cares about character names and it's a real pain to code in. However, if it's really important to you and your story, you can just give the character a selection of names to choose from, and keep track of them using a name variable where each name option corresponds to a value. If you really want a fully-customizable name, there is an article somewhere on the articles page (link provided by mazdark) that explains how to do it. The basic premise is you code a seperate variable for each letter in the name, and then have an enormous scripting textblock to spell it out one letter at a time each place the name appears. It's really not worth it, and there's no better way to do it, as variables on this engine can only be set to numerical values, not text ones.

Weapons and armor is much easier, but still not newbie friendly. In this article I explain an armor-equiping system, and in this article I explain one battle system that can be used to implement it. (Shameless self plug: If you want to see them both in action, check out this dungeon crawling game.)

However, for your first game I recommend doing something much simpler, just to figure out how the editor works, or spend a while messing around with it before starting a game. That way, when you tackle a bigger project, you'll be able to get the editor to do what you want much more quickly.

First time troubles

one year ago

Agreeing with the other comments already made.  The easiest way I can think of to write around what you are doing is to add a variable called LIAR.  Then when you want to give them the option to tell their name or lie, you given them two links to leave the page "Lie about your name" and "Tell the truth about your name".  On the first, have clicking the lie link set the %LIAR variable to 1.  On the other link, have it set %LIAR to 0.  Then in your text on subsequent pages you can check %LIAR%=%1% to output what you want to happen if they are a liar, and a second paragraph that checks %LIAR%<%1% to output the truthteller outcome.

You can even check the LIAR variable to hide a link for "Come clean about lying" on subsequent pages if they haven't lied yet.