by Gamefic on March 20, 2017
Working on Gamefic has had the unexpected side effect of leading me to work on IDEs. Originally I wanted to make authoring software for Gamefic, but that project gradually turned into a suite of general-purpose Ruby tools. One of those tools is code completion: the ability for editors to recommend snippets of code that fit what you're trying to do. This weekend I released the code completion tool as a Ruby gem and a Visual Studio Code extension.
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by Gamefic on February 5, 2017
I wanted to take an opportunity to discuss some aspects of the Gamefic project and my objectives behind it. I've been working on it sporadically for about five years, but only recently have I been able to dedicate a significant amount of time to it. Development of the framework is ramping up and new game projects are on the horizon. Here's an impromptu list of my thoughts.
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by Gamefic on February 1, 2017
The latest updates to Gamefic include a new scene architecture to simplify customization. Authors can specify code blocks for the scene's beginning and ending, customize the prompt, and more.
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by Gamefic on December 16, 2016
Version 1.2 of Gamefic and the SDK are on RubyGems. This release features new versions of the CLI executables with inline help and improved error handling.
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by Gamefic on November 27, 2016
A while back I quietly introduced an improvement to dynamic entities. It's always been possible to generate entities at runtime, but for a long time they weren't compatible with snapshots. In other words, any entity created at runtime would be lost in an undo or restore. Gamefic 1.0 was the first release to handle dynamic entities properly in snapshots. The latest version extends this capability with a new feature called subplots.
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by Gamefic on September 15, 2016
Today I released Version 1 of Gamefic and the Gamefic SDK. This release is significant for several reasons:
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by Gamefic on August 1, 2016
I've been experimenting with player bots for interactive fiction. Besides being a fun exercise, I thought they might be a useful debugging tool. I even thought they might be able to prove the "validity" of a story model, e.g., that the story can never be played into an unfinishable state. I'm not sure that's possible with a non-trivial story, but I figured I'd give it a shot.
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by Gamefic on April 28, 2016
The original version of the standard library was hardcoded to use the second person when referring to the player's character, e.g., "You go north." Not anymore. Scripts can access an object that defines grammar rules for the PC through the you method.
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by Gamefic on April 18, 2016
The Gamefic project went through a major overhaul this weekend. Most of these changes have been in development for months. Saturday I started merging them into the master branch on the GitHub repo.
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by Gamefic on June 28, 2015
The Director class that handles actions just went through a major overhaul. Most of the changes are internal, so the impact on plot scripts should be minimal. Among the changes:
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