I’m tired, so no stories this post: just a boring list of things I did over the last four or five days to my game.

  1. Added a ‘can discard’ feature, so some cards have to be played, and some can be discarded. Most will be discardable, I predict, but if you’re in a dungeon-type location, or if there’s a combat encounter, you’ll probably have to pick an option.

  2. I made it trackable from where you are when you open a storylet. It means I can add storylets which are openable from the inventory, and the player is returned to the inventory (or wherever I want, in the future) once the storylet is over.

  3. Finally added a time tracking system. There are four ‘ticks’ per hour, equating to fifteen minutes. I can define how many ticks an action will take, if any. Then I added a clock to the UI which tracks time and day - no dates, because I want it to be ambiguous when the story takes place.

  4. Cleaned up some old warnings which weren’t breaking anything but were annoying me. I also identified an unused parameter for stats, but I’ve left it for now in case I need it later. For the life of me I can’t remember what it does.

  5. Improved the inventory. Each item in the inventory is now loaded from an item database, which will be a set of jsons - one json per item. As I said before, storylets can now be opened from inventory items which I can define in the json itself. I can also add a forbidden_effects parameter to them so once the storylet has been opened, the item can’t be retrieved again - one item per storylet. But you can still open the storylet from the item for those that remain in your inventory; this means you can, for example, read books multiple times, but you’ll only get the item(s) from them once. Eventually items will be able to heal health, boost stats, etc.

  6. I added a gold border to usable items in the inventory, to make them clearer. I’ll probably make it look prettier later.

  7. Finally, I had a system where specific cards would only appear depending on certain circumstances, dicatated by hidden effects which are added to the player based on other story choices. Now, though, I can also add them to individual choices, meaning the storylet might still show up, but specific choices won’t if the player has or doesn’t have an effect or requirement respectively.

I think that’s it. Remember to wash your hands.