Dumb N00b Questions

Game Development ChoiceScript Help
1

I’ve just read the excellent new Interactive ChoiceScript Tutorial, but I’m left with a few silly questions:

  1. How do you make a new game? I don’t want to try and publish with the files from My First Choicescript Game, as easy as that would be, since it appears there would be legal ramifications. It also appears it matters what the files are named, since the “startup” document was referenced in the Tutorial.

  2. The Tutorial says that CoG requires you to let the player choose their sex, orientation, race, etc. Is this true?

I really hope it isn’t, because my game is about the player choosing courses of action for an already-existent character in a time in his life where he’s shaping his morality and relationships to others (similar to what the player does in the Witcher series, for a comparison). Part of the fun is supposed to be that the player learns about this character and his background as the story progresses, and I wanted to make the game have nothing to do with sex and romance (one protagonist is a little boy, and the other is asexual). I’ve also seen at least one ChoiceScript game where you can’t choose race or sex (Guenevere).

  1. In My First ChoiceScript Game, the document “gosub” doesn’t have any indentation, which I’m given to believe is a requirement in coding ChoiceScipt. Yet, when I tried to add indentation, it started giving me errors. I seemed to have fixed the original ones by putting it all on one line (very hard to read on Notepad) and regularizing the spacing in between commands, but now it’s giving me “gosub line 4: It is illegal to fall out of a *choice statement; you must *goto or *finish before the end of the indented block.” How do you fix this?

The Tutorial says that this message occurs when you don’t have a command after a choice option, but I didn’t change the original text of My First ChoiceScript Game as far as I remember, and that worked fine before I added indentation.

2

  1. You need to keep startup.txt and choicescript_stats.txt You can delete everything else in the scenes folder. Don’t delete anything in any of the other folders though.

  2. For Choice of Games, yes, but you’re probably not going to be writing an official game. For Hosted Games no, you don’t have the same limitations.

  3. Download Notepad++ or another text editor instead of using raw notepad.

Everything doesn’t need to be indented. There’s rules to what’s indented and how the indents work.

The error line explains it. You need to tell the gosub code where to go at the end. So you have to have a *goto or *finish in there, otherwise it doesn’t know what to do once the subroutine has run…

AHA! I see what your problem here might be. It really will be fixed if you download a text editor and look at the files in it instead of notepad. The indentations will show up as opposed to everything looking like one long line.

1 Like
3

Incidentally if you haven’t already, try https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/45314691/CSGuide.html from The Beginners Guide to ChoiceScript

4

So, if I just make a Notepad or Notepad++ document and put it in the ChoiceScript folder somewhere, it’ll end up in the game?

Also, it’ good to know I don’t have to make another story!!

5

A .txt file yes. You do also need to set up the startup.txt document in order to link to your file. THere’s instructions though on how to do that.

6

Where exactly are the instructions?

7
4 Likes