Sidenote: i can not use the multireplacer like one of those russian dolls, can I?
??? What (who ?) Russian dolls ?
You know those wooden dolls that stack into each other? Can that be done with the command too?
You can use ${} inside @{}, but you canāt stack @{} themselves like a matryoshka (nice simile), no. Per here.
I tried and failed, but it probably was just missing a space or something somewhere.
Edit:
Ah dang. Back to the ifs then
Oh, thatās really interesting ā I keep noticing similarities between your code and mine and keep forgetting that I did, in fact use ifs and gosubs that way before Iād seen yours (the second choice I ever wrote uses a gosub describing leaving the room in exactly the same way as your example). The musician analogy makes a lot of sense. Now that you mention it, the way I think of a memorized pieces of music is very similar to keeping track of a story in my head. Not the whole thing at once but āthis connects to that and this echoes the spot earlier and this is the change of tone that sets up the end.ā
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Rightā¦and things that run concurrently are kind of like chords? :D Moving at the same time, but different pitches, possibly even going to different places but eventually converging along the melodic line again.
This will be a fabulous new line to use if I pick up teaching again. 'Practise your instruments, children, so that some day you too can use these skills when you write IF. Itāll be great!"
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@Fiogan, this meme is for you.
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The reason for the contest is to motivate lots more people to write games, and to publish the one(s) most likely to be popular (and thus profitable).
My argument has been that coding efficiency and use of specialized ChoiceScript features like multireplace bears little if any relation to what is likely to be a profitable gameā¦ and so CoG should put less emphasis on them and more on staying a welcoming environment for people who fit the āgood author/bad coderā profile.
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Iāll admit I didnāt even know about multireplace until I read this thread. I just keep abusing *temp variables 
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Right, but it has a literal cost: editorial time, which is not an infinite or free resource. So sure, an inefficiently coded game could be a profitable one, but when you consider how profitable a game is, itās probably difficult for one to factor in editorial time as an actual cost against our profitability. Suppose I spend a lot of time on a game and itās not especially profitable. Weāre ādownā twice on that game.
Thereās certainly a professional expectation for me, that is to say, itās been made clear that itās my job to teach authors how to code efficiently. We offer CS tutorials to authors at the start of their contract, and my editorial notes are designed to help authors make full use of CS, and cut down on repeated text in addition to making notes on style and design mechanics. I think you shouldnāt be taking what Iām saying here personallyāyou came to write games for us in a way thatās quite different from authors in recent years, and at a time when we didnāt have three people doing full time editorial work with a slate of 15-20 games each.
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Tbh I didnāt even read the first post but I just want to say I really appreciate that lately when a new game comes out the word count is in the description. With the older games it happened sometimes that I bought a game then I was disappointed when I found out how short it is, I even felt like I just wasted my money. So I just want to say thanks to who ever thought of including the word count in the description.
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I would even go so far as to say that the word count should be mandatory in one of the bullet points, or in the description. I really like that most of the new HGs and CoGs have been including this, because, unlike paper books, the readers arenāt able to tell how long or short a title is before they actually get to the end. It just lets readers have a more informed decision, and I feel like it could help with ātoo short, Iām disappointed!ā reviews.
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I agree with @Havenstone in general that itās important not to make pristine coding a requirement for authorship here. No reader is going to leave a one-star review because they feel not enough Boolean variables were incorporated. As long as it is bug-free, the fanbase isnāt likely to care. But I still agree with it having a category in the contest. Coding skill is always something to strive for, and the games that win a contest like this should either be the total package (well-written and coded) or so darn good on the writing and mechanics side that they can overcome poor scores in the coding category.
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An outsider like me is certainly in a poor place to do it, and Iām sorry for advancing my guesses with an over-confident tone. Only you guys can assess the dollar cost of the extra editorial time that gets sucked into this, and decide whether on the whole thatās a cost worth paying against the much-harder-to-measure odds of excluding profitable authors. (Itās also a cost worth mitigatingāitās great that you coach your selected authors on this, Iām sure you do it very well, and Iām sorry I missed out on it.)
AbsolutelyāIām from the transitional era. 
But isnāt the contest a different way again, and one in which thereās some danger of discouraging good authors if issues of code quality are given too prominent a place?
I wasnāt using myself/XoR as an example because Iām personally affected, but because I thought CoG might be more likely to do some reflection based on the concrete example of a successful game. Thereās another very good author who spoke up upthread, and I wasnāt sure whether the implications of what he and others said were being taken seriously or not.
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I guess Iām confused. No oneās being excluded from working with us because they arenāt especially good at using ChoiceScript. Thatās not how we decide to offer contracts or even (that Iāve seen) spike games in progress. Authors donāt learn ChoiceScript until they have been offered a contract. Itās 5% of the contest score, so itās not a huge factor there, either. I mean, even the (to me!) basic prose styling, āhow well you write at a sentence level,ā isnāt given as much consideration (10% of score) as I tend to give it in evaluating writers. So on some level you donāt have to be that great a fiction writer or coder to win the contest, though presumably, if the competition is tight, the winner will be the one who excels in every category. Thatās the point of a judging rubric. But perhaps your point is that efficiency shouldnāt be part of the consideration at all?
I donāt think there are any real implications here, certainly not in terms of preventing people from working with us. I just wanted to point out that not all word counts are created equally.
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Personally I think the gosub vs copying code shouldnāt make that much difference to a reader. Sure to an editor having to edit a scene once is better than five times (and likewise for an author to only have to go through one scene instead if five) but still to a reader they would still see the same amount of words.
Iād probably says itād be fairer to have an average play length instead of an overal word count which can be bloated by code even without repeated scenes (obviously depending on the complexity of the game).
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On the note:
Iām certain I am somehow managing to just not find the answer on the forum, but how can i do a āwithout codeā wordcount?
But that too leads to misleading numbers when a game isnāt efficiently codedā¦ A efficiently coded 100,000 words with a 20,000 word playthrough is better than an an inefficient 100,000 with a 20,000 playthrough because by implication, youād need to play 5 times and make different choices each time to get the most out of the first, but the second you might just get the same 20,000-ish words ā¦
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Well, thereās always the hard wayā¦ Copy and paste ājust the textā into something like Microsoft Word and have it count the words for you.
ā¦
Should viable playthrough count be a part of standard evaluation, then?
It would take up minimal ad copy, I thinkā¦ Example:
200,000 words. 6 playthroughs.
And you can always have an asterisk after linking to a longer explanation of whatās meant by 6 playthroughs, or however many there are.
I think the problem with this setup is that some text in the early game will inevitably be repeated in order to get to later choices, given the ātraditionalā design of current games. That will skew any estimated playthrough count.
This dilemma may actually be a continuation of the āwhat counts as an endingā discussion, because I think what it boils down to is the potential amount of unique content the player experiences per playthrough.
I wonder if thereās some sort of abbreviation that can be usedā¦ Potential Unique Contentā¦ PUC?
PUC: 20k / play
Maybe?