Lethe in Ink

I released Lethe 0.1  on itch.io yesterday.  You wake in a hotel room with absolutely no memory and must unravel the events that led to this point.  This is an early release that only  covers events before you leave the hotel. It should play well on mobile devices. I've tested it on my iPhone, tablet and a variety of browsers on Windows and MacOs.

 At certain points in the game, the choices available to the player will depend on whether they have acquired or disposed of certain items.  This led me to explore creating a simple inventory system using Ink LISTs. Ink's LIST is an elegantly peculiar data type that has features of enums and sets found in other languages, and other capabilities.  A LIST declaration both declares a data type defining the possible values of the list and allocates a variable of this type. LISTs are manipulated using fairly intuitive operators, for example:  += to add values, -= to remove values, ? to query if the list contains values. The Ink official user's guide has excellent explanations of all the cool features of LISTs. You can add values specified in one list to another list.  LIST values can share names, but if they do, you must specify which LIST originates the value you mean.   It turns out to be quite possible to confuse yourself if you are not careful, but i...

The Inky editor  allows you to play and rewind the game as you edit your ink script.  Inky can export the game to the web, using a template consisting of the required HTML, CSS and Javascript. Writing web-based interaction with Ink  describes how the template interacts with the Ink script and covers customizing appearance using CSS. As you play, the story scrolls up the screen.  Fairly early on, I found that I was having trouble separating text from the current turn (last choice) from previous turns. This seemed like a good opportunity to experiment with altering the default template. The standard paragraph style is: p { font-size : 13pt ; color : #888 ; /* color: rgb(229, 29, 29); */ line-height : 1.7em ; font-weight : lighter ; } I added a new class with a slightly larger font size and weight: /* Tom */ .last_turn { font-size : 14pt ; color : #000 ; font-weight : bolder ; /* color: rgb(29, 29, 29); */ } Then a li...

On June 16, 2022, the followers of Aaron A. Reed's 50 Years of Text Games substack received "Bonus Article:Amnesia. The doomed text game from a lauded sci-fi writer with ambitions too big for its disks" . It's a fascinating read, describing how leading science fiction writer Thomas M. Disch and a talented programmer Kevin Bentley wrote 1986's Amnesia computer game.  He includes links to the original manuscript, a browser emulation of the original game, and 'Amnesia Restored' - an expanded version produced by a large team of students and faculty at Washington State University. Disch's manuscript runs 436 pages, containing too much material to fit on the floppy disks in most PCs in 1986.  T he content represents a challenge to the parser-based user interface common to interactive fiction of the era.  It reads like narrative, with some implementation suggestions. The original Amnesia, and Amnesia Restored, match text typed by the player to choices in the ...