Items that can be eaten

Food and drink turn up in a lot of games — rations that keep you going, a potion that heals you, a mushroom that probably shouldn’t have been eaten. Quest Viva has a built-in feature for all of these.

Tick “Edible” on the object’s Features tab, then go to the Edible tab that appears and change the dropdown from “Cannot be eaten” to “Can be eaten”.

That one change does three things:

• the EAT verb now works on the object
• an “Eat” verb appears in the object’s display verbs and inventory verbs, so the player can click it
• when the object is eaten, it is destroyed

The default behaviour

With “Can be eaten” selected, eating the object prints a message and removes it from the game. Leave “Message to print when eating” blank for the standard wording, or fill it in with your own:

The apple is crisp and sharp, and gone in four bites.

If the “Health” feature is enabled on the game’s Features tab, a “Change health by” box also appears. Whatever number you put there is added to the player’s health when the object is eaten — so 20 for a decent meal, -30 for the mushroom.

The player’s health starts at 100 and is held between 0 and 100, so a meal cannot take them above full, and a poisoning cannot take them below nothing. When health does reach zero, the game’s “script to run when health reaches zero” fires — see Score, health and money.

Running a script instead

For anything more involved, tick “Run a script” and write the script yourself.

The important thing to know is that a script replaces the default behaviour completely. Nothing is printed, health does not change, and — the one that catches people out — the object is not destroyed. Everything is up to your script:

msg ("You drink the potion. The pain in your leg fades.")
player.health = player.health + 40
player.poisoned = false
destroy ("potion")

That is usually what you want as soon as eating something has consequences. Some examples:

Something left over. The player eats the sandwich but keeps the foil:

msg ("You eat the sandwich, and screw the foil into a ball.")
MoveObject (foil, player)
destroy ("sandwich")

Several helpings. A bag of biscuits that can be eaten more than once:

this.helpings = this.helpings - 1
if (this.helpings > 0) {
  msg ("You eat a biscuit. There are " + this.helpings + " left.")
}
else {
  msg ("You eat the last biscuit and screw up the packet.")
  destroy (this.name)
}

Give the object a helpings integer attribute on its Attributes tab to go with that.

Refusing to eat. Nothing obliges the script to let the player eat at all:

if (player.parent = kitchen) {
  msg ("You eat the stew straight from the pot.")
  destroy ("stew")
}
else {
  msg ("You would rather not eat that cold.")
}

Note that “Run a script” is an advanced option, so you will only see it with advanced options showing.

Drink, and other verbs

There is no separate “drinkable” feature — a potion or a bottle of water is just an edible object whose messages talk about drinking. If you want the player to be able to type DRINK POTION as well as EAT POTION, add a “drink” verb to the object on its Verbs tab.

The same trick covers anything else the player might consume: SMOKE, SWALLOW, SNIFF. Use the edible feature for the one that destroys the object, and verbs for the rest.