Dev Log: Horror Text Adventure #43

I forgot to mention last time that I did fix things so common rooms don't have random items placed in them, but are custom-made.

Items can now both have things in them and on them, so a dresser might have some items in the drawers but also lying on top of it.

I then set about creating chalk, chalkboards, and the "draw" verb.  I wanted to make it so the player could draw whatever they wanted on a chalkboard as long as there was some chalk around.  However, my draw function threw some compile time errors in, and I had some fun learning about the difference between standard mode and strict mode compilation.  Strict mode is extremely useful, and I don't want to turn it off, but I get compile errors if I code properly (and just get warnings if I cheat).  I would hope that there might be some way to use strict mode with exceptions for some blocks of code during compile time, but I doubt it.  For now, I'm keeping strict mode on and making gunky code until I figure out something better.

You can draw a lot of stuff!

But in any case, the player can draw on the chalkboard now, any number of times, provided there is some chalk in the room or in the player's hand to draw with.  The player can also then look at the chalkboard and see what drawings have been made.

Making things appear reasonable in English with proper punctuation was the hardest part.  I expect that probably will be tough overall.  I wonder if I should have a grammar function of some sort.  That'll be a ball.

Also, for some reason, there was no error message for the player when no command was recognized, so I added that.  It's the little things that matter.

While I was typing this log up, I decided also to set a cap on the number of drawings on a chalkboard before I forgot.  So for right now it's set to eleven, so the player can't be slammed with a list of a thousand images when they look at the chalkboard.  I definitely want to get the chalkboard erasable next.  Down the line it'll be neat to come up with a way to make it grungier and grungier until it requires a washing to be able to draw anything visible.  But for now, I'll just make the ability to erase the entire thing and that should work well enough.  Also, a little extra fun you can do with the space of eleven drawings:

Except that the middle squares aren't "corners".  This game isn't free of human errors yet.