I spent a lot of time writing and entering data for my game over the past few weeks. I finished the bulk of that phase tonight and will be able to progress to the programming once my brain uncramps.

A lot of it was fun, inspiring and challenging to write. The text has to work logically and emotionally, and pay important game points, while fitting into an interface that has far less room in it and is far less forgiving than that of a word processor. When you do assemble the right combination of words that you think will do a particular job under these punitive conditions, it's rewarding.

What's less rewarding is supplying data for all the less glamourous props - EG THE BANANA. I am content for the game to say 'You see nothing special' if you examine the banana. The point is, I do have to supply such information for each of the 160ish items in the game, whether they are cool things or whether they are the banana.

The game will understand about 130 nouns and 100 synonyms for those nouns. As for verbs, that's more up in the air, but my guess is it will know about 40.

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Feedback
	zippdementia - July 12, 2009 (10:47 AM) A truly good adventure game will have witty dialouge for every object... especially the banana.
	JANUS2 - July 12, 2009 (11:28 AM) I dunno. You can have witty dialogue overkill and that tends to detract from the odd unexpected witty response. Sometimes a useless banana is just a useless banana!
	aschultz - July 12, 2009 (01:08 PM) If witty dialogue, or making it, gets in the way of plot, my guess would be chuck it. I have a nonserious game I'm making with Inform 7 and I get a few pieces of witty dialogue every week, maybe. Mostly, I just learn how to use a new verb, then throw in some funny "deaths." Game is unreleasable as is, since it's set in my high school and insults a few of my "favorite" teachers. But it's tremendously fun to write and to see the different languages people created to make text adventures and such easier. I was surprised to learn that even in Hitchhiker's Guide, Douglas Adams collaborated. I think the real risk of saying something witty about every item is that you'll get a lot of cliched witty just to have something to say, which takes away from the good stuff.
	bloomer - July 12, 2009 (08:03 PM) In this game you play a depressive schoolgirl, so what matters is that all the descriptions are totally authentic to her headspace and what's going on. Being the protagonist, she benefits a little from 'interesting protagonist bias', so she probably has a sprinkle of wit beyond her station, but in the end, everything has to be at the service of the realism of the game. Sadly, this means no witty descriptions of bananas. Also, I don't have unlimited disk space :) This thing has to fit on two 140kb floppies. Infocom could probably just fit it in one, but I can't use any text compression algorithms with the Eamon engine.