More Advanced WibbleQuesting

Walkthrough

Admit it, you’re lazy. I’m really lazy, that’s why I wrote all this documentation, I only want mind-bendingly hard questions sent my way. So here’s how I make sure that I don’t have to type my way though an adventure game every time I want to test something. And to make sure it all works.

WibbleQuest uses an amazing test system called KIF (Thanks @squareup ) to emulate touching the screen and pressing buttons. I’ve worked on this to create a smaller DSL that allows you to run through commands one by one in the order that you want.

There is a file called Walkthrough.m inside your Game folder, this comes with a run through of one of my example games included. To run it just change your scheme to Game Walkthrough, it’s the big button in the top left.

Block based programming

Ok ok ok, so I’m even lazier than I thought, a lot of the times I think that it just takes too damn long to create new Item subclasses, and add tiny amounts of custom code to them. So congratulations everyone else. It’s made in a way so you don’t have to do that.

Every major object inside WibbleQuest can dynamically add commands without resorting to callbacks using the function respondTo. It’s limitation is that it only does simple string matching, so you cannot do command aliases ( have two responses do the same action ) but it gives you a nice way to quickly add a custom command. Because the more of the the richer your game will feel.

These commands have a higher precedence than almost all other commands. You can use these to override core commands like north, or say. So be careful.

Item *bubba = [[Item alloc] init];
[bubba respondTo:@"drink bubba" with:^{
  [WQ print:@"Slurp!"];
}];

You can use it on rooms to add really quick descriptions or actions.

Room * bathroom = [[Room alloc] init];
bathroom.id = @"bathroom";
bathroom.name = @"Bathroom";
bathroom.description = @"Dingy bathroom, nothing particularly out of the ordinary, bits of terrible graffitti and the smell of sweat.";
[bathroom respondTo:@"examine graffitti" with:^{
  [WQ print:@"It's colourful, you're not really that interested though"];
}];
[bathroom respondTo:@"smell" with:^{
  [WQ print:@"It smells of booze and sweat. Appealing."];
}];
[bathroom respondTo:@"use bathroom" with:^{
  [WQ print:@"You figure that you could do with a pee-break."];
  [WQ wait:1];
  [WQ print:@"Perfect."];
}];
[bathroom connectEast:hallwayCenter];

I want to change the help system

The help system is pretty dynamic, much like how you can add commands from any Item, Room or Person, you can do the same thing with help commands. Items can add descriptions to the help system pretty simply using addCommandToHelp and removeCommandFromHelp.

-(void)onPickup {
  [WQ print:@"Bubba sloshes around as you pick him up"];
  [self addCommandToHelp:@"use bubba" withDescription:@"Take a swig from your Bubba"];
}

-(void)onDrop {
  [WQ print:@"You drop bubba onto the floor and he rolls casually onto his side."];
  [self removeCommandFromHelp:@"use bubba"];
}

I dislike your colour scheme!

Err, okay there, no need to be confrontational. It’s easy, you just have to edit style.css. If you don’t know CSS, don’t worry, you’ll only have to know a bit about hex numbers to edit the existing one.

I dislike your icon

Yeah me too -to be honest, so, why not just overwrite the one that’s in there. Want to do all the other bazillion icons too? Then go do that in your project settings. You just drag the files into the summary tab and it’s done.

I don’t see any documentation for the Store class, you suck.

I felt that the Store class was a bit too small to really give a lot of visual retail space in the docs, so here’s how it works.

A Store is an Person subclass that natively supports buying Item subclasses by trading currency. By default we give you a money property on the Player instance, so you can add money by adding to or removing from that.

You add a store to a room in the same way as you do an encounter or as a person, it’s just called store, and they are first class citizens in responding to commands. The way you add items to the shop is by passing in a class and a value.

  [store addItemOfClass: [Microphone class] withValue:45];

You can do this as you create it in your Game file, or in the Store subclass if you choose. When a player does the shop / trade command it will list the inventory of your Store to the screen. From there they need to use the command buy to purchase an object. There’s quite a few hooks in so that you can narrate all you need to with the following commands.

  -(void)beforeTrading;
  -(void)afterTrading;

I want my text to really pop

Hrm, well ok… I guess I’ll tell you a secret then. All this stuff is just HTML, if you so choose ( though I try to avoid it ) you can put HTML inline, say for example you could use word on a word to emphasise a point. Or you can use span’s and style to completely change the colour and size of the text.