§5.2. Traits Determined By the Player
Some IF tries to make the viewpoint character more congenial to the player by allowing some customization.
Identity Theft demonstrates asking the player to supply the viewpoint character's name.
Pink or Blue demonstrates a way to let the player choose a gender at the start of play: this will mostly be interesting if the rest of the story makes some use of the player's choice. Since that example is written expressly to demonstrate included Inform 6 code, however, we may find it more congenial to generalize from the more flexible Baritone, Bass.
This is not the only way to go - as we'll see in the next section, there's also something to be said for making the viewpoint character a strongly distinct creature with well-defined preferences and attitudes.
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![]() | Back to §5.1. The Human Body |
![]() | Onward to §5.3. Characterization |
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The "reading a command" activity is rather advanced; for the moment, what we need to understand is that we're intervening in commands at the start of play and insisting that the player's first instruction to the game consist of a choice of gender. After that point, the gender will be set and play will proceed as normal. In order to do the parsing, we define gender as a kind of value, and give several alternate names to each gender.
If we had a whole series of things to ask the player about, we might define a whole series of kinds of value
and use a "construction stage" variable to keep track of the current stage of character-construction, as in
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The "reading a command" activity is rather advanced; for the moment, what we need to understand is that we're intervening in commands at the start of play and insisting that the player's first instruction to the game consist of a choice of gender. After that point, the gender will be set and play will proceed as normal. In order to do the parsing, we define gender as a kind of value, and give several alternate names to each gender.
If we had a whole series of things to ask the player about, we might define a whole series of kinds of value
and use a "construction stage" variable to keep track of the current stage of character-construction, as in
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