Varying your text

When we wanted the TV to give a different answer depending on whether it was switched on, we wrote a script with an “if” in it. That works, and for anything complicated it’s what you want. But when all that changes is a sentence or two, there’s a much shorter way: the text processor.

The text processor lets you put instructions inside your text, in curly braces. Quest Viva works them out as it prints, so a description written once can still say something different each time the player looks at it.

Text that changes with the game

Remember Bob’s description. We set it up as a script, with an “if” to check his “alive” flag:

if (GetBoolean(Bob, "alive")) {
  msg ("Bob is sitting up, appearing to feel somewhat under the weather.")
}
else {
  msg ("Bob is lying on the floor, a lot more still than usual.")
}

Go back to Bob’s Setup tab and change his “Look at” description from “Run script” back to “Text”. Then type this in:

{either Bob.alive:Bob is sitting up, appearing to feel somewhat under the weather.|Bob is lying on the floor, a lot more still than usual.}

Play the game and look at Bob before and after using the defibrillator. It behaves exactly as it did before - but there’s no script any more, and the whole thing is one line.

{either ...} takes a condition, then the text to print if it’s true, a |, and the text to print if it’s false. Anywhere you could write an expression in a script, you can write it here. If you don’t need the “false” half, {if ...} is shorter:

The kitchen is cold and the stench of the overflowing bin makes you feel somewhat faint.{if window.isopen: A cold draught comes in through the open window.} The back door is in the south wall.

Note the space inside the curly brace, before “A cold draught” - the text processor prints exactly what you give it, so you need a space there to separate the two sentences, and no space after the closing brace.

Text that changes because it’s been seen before

{once:...} prints its text the first time only. It’s ideal for the little bit of scene-setting that’s right the first time the player arrives and tiresome on the fourth visit. Change the lounge description to:

This is quite a plain lounge with an old beige carpet and peeling wallpaper. {once:You have lived here for six years, and you still hate that wallpaper.}

Play the game, walk to the kitchen and come back. The second sentence appears once and never again. ({notfirst:...} is the opposite - it prints every time except the first.)

Text that varies at random

{random:...} picks one of the options you give it, separated by colons:

{random:A fat bee:A fat and determined bee:A bee the size of a small plum}, making its way round the kitchen with no obvious plan.

A little of this goes a long way. Used on a description the player will read many times it makes the game feel alive; used everywhere it just makes the game feel unreliable.

Links the player can click

Many players would rather click than type. {object:...} turns a word into a link to an object, so that clicking it brings up that object’s menu of verbs:

This is quite a plain lounge with an old beige carpet and peeling {object:wallpaper}.

That prints the object’s name. To use different words for the link, add them after a second colon:

...an old beige {object:carpet:carpet that has seen better days}.

{command:...} does the same for a command, running it when the player clicks:

You could always {command:watch tv:see what's on}.

Both only work in a text adventure - a gamebook has no objects, and uses {page:...} links instead.

Finding these in the editor

You don’t have to remember the syntax. Every large text box in the editor has a toolbar above it with an Insert menu, holding most of the directives above - the link ones ask you to pick the object or command from a list, so you can’t misspell the name.

And the rest

There is a good deal more: {select} for picking text by a number, {here} and {nothere} for whether an object is in the room, {b:...} and {i:...} for bold and italic, and {game.score} and friends for dropping an attribute’s value straight into a sentence. The text processor reference has the full list, and says exactly where in your game the text processor does and doesn’t run.

One thing worth knowing now: the text processor also runs on Quest Viva’s own built-in messages, which is how you change the wording of anything the game says without writing a script.