Try exploring this story: steamhighwayman0-3
I’ve now completed a demo map to explore on your velosteam: 14 passages or ‘rooms’ that respond to the order and time in which you visit them, generating unique text and interactive traffic events. I haven’t got any graphic interface for this yet – it exists purely as the relationship between passages. But I have sketched it here to help you locate yourself:
One of the underlying ‘vanilla’ engines of this story was always to be your ability to rob any passers-by, either creating story-lines as you become despised or hated by particular groups or simply making easy money. This means that in true open-world fashion, you will need to be able to interact with all the traffic that comes your way.
At the moment these interactions are very rough, but essentially different sorts of road (main road, road or lane) and different times of day (day/night) will be more or less likely to generate different classes of traffic (pedestrians/farm vehicles/goods vehicles/guild vehicles/locobuses/private steam carriages etc). You may be able to hail them and get rumours or rob them – reminiscent perhaps, and purposefully, of the sail ahoy mechanic in Sid Meier’s Pirates Gold.
I intend to keep working on this demo map until all the major modules are working. So far we have:
- A weather generator
- A clock
- An inventory
- Health and wound counters
- A rudimentary fight system (not yet plugged into the encounters with traffic
- A fence where you can sell items (with still some bugs)
- A pub where you can rent a room
- Locals who will give you a rumour to investigate (and the space for many more)
- Characters who will remember you
- A wreck engine that will leave destroyed traffic at the side of the road
- New today – the ability to wait somewhere until nightfall or morning
I mean to finish writing Squire Lynch’s quest, finish the interactions with the guild engines and create a quest at a nearby steam fairground. Still haven’t done anything about my pistol engine…
Also I’ve got some lineation and matching issues with the generated text in my passages. I’m slowly building more reliable templates so that in a completed version, everything should look seamless. Other bugs include:
- Unresolved fights
- Unwritten encounters with private steam carriages and quest vehicles
- Some difficulties with { and [ trailers
Breakthrough! I’ve rewritten my inventory system in Steam Highwayman to make something much, much more streamlined. Discovering that I was able to display a passage named after the nth string in an array, I’ve moved onto creating a passage for each generic object and giving the reader the opportunity to read about it whenever they open their inventory. The same passage, when displayed within a passage tagged “shop”, gives the option to sell that object.
