Slightly Wrong

Example 4

★★

A room whose description changes slightly after our first visit there.

A fairly common effect in interactive fiction is a room which is described differently on the first visit than on subsequent visits. We can produce this effect as follows:

Play/modify in Borogove

Play in Quixe

"Slightly Wrong"

Awning is a room. "A tan awning is stretched on tent poles over the dig-site, providing a little shade to the workers here; you are at the bottom of a square twenty feet on a side, marked out with pegs and lines of string. Uncovered in the south face of this square is an awkward opening into the earth."

Slightly Wrong Chamber is south of the Awning. "[if unvisited]When you first step into the room, you are bothered by the sense that something is not quite right: perhaps the lighting, perhaps the angle of the walls. [end if]A mural on the far wall depicts a woman with a staff, tipped with a pine-cone. She appears to be watching you."

Test me with "look / s / look".

Awning
A tan awning is stretched on tent poles over the dig-site, providing a little shade to the workers here; you are at the bottom of a square twenty feet on a side, marked out with pegs and lines of string. Uncovered in the south face of this square is an awkward opening into the earth.

>(Testing.)

>[1] look
Awning
A tan awning is stretched on tent poles over the dig-site, providing a little shade to the workers here; you are at the bottom of a square twenty feet on a side, marked out with pegs and lines of string. Uncovered in the south face of this square is an awkward opening into the earth.

>[2] s

Slightly Wrong Chamber
When you first step into the room, you are bothered by the sense that something is not quite right: perhaps the lighting, perhaps the angle of the walls. A mural on the far wall depicts a woman with a staff, tipped with a pine-cone. She appears to be watching you.

>[3] look
Slightly Wrong Chamber
A mural on the far wall depicts a woman with a staff, tipped with a pine-cone. She appears to be watching you.

Note the "[if unvisited]…" in the description of the Slightly Wrong Chamber. A room is considered to be "unvisited" until after the player has seen its description for the first time.

The bracketed text creates a special rule for printing; we will learn more about these in the sections on text with variations and text with substitutions.

Some further fine print: we might write our condition as "if unvisited", "if the location is unvisited", or "if the Chamber is unvisited" -- all of these constructions would be acceptable, but in the absence of more specifics, the condition is understood to apply to the object whose description it is.