#mindblind PC

[mindblindbard]

Hia!

I love mindblind, and ever since I read it my brain is, completly unprompted I might add, coming up with fantastic ideas for my own interactive fiction. This would be great idea for my next creative project... if I wasn't utterly terrified of coding. How did you get over that hurdle and any tips for someone who can make the words do good but has approximately less than zero knowledge of computer stuff?

So, I’m the least techy person ever who somehow does techy things (ask me someday about how I built a PC by connecting the thinga-ma-giggy to the doo-hickey-ma-bob). That disclaimer aside, I personally found it helpful to go about learning choicescript coding the same way I learned dead languages: in very small doses. I was a Classics major (Latin and Ancient Greek), so language learning for me was about declining verbs and dissecting passages, not gaining immediate fluency.

And that’s all coding really is: mathy grammar.

(Below is what worked for me.)

Don’t try to go through all the Choicescript tutorials at once. Learn the bare minimum you need to get by in order to write a few passages (*choice, *label, and *goto). Write the passages, then code them. Learn to make a stat screen and how to set stats (*set). All of Mind Blind’s Chapter 1 was initially written using only those four commands. 

Then I retroactively added inserting names (for both people and cookies) and added in *if flavor text based on stats. 

Then CorvusWitchcraft (an amazing writer, who codes eons better than I) on the COG Forum  taught me about Implicit Command Flow and *fake_choice. Asking for help . . . helps! 

Eventually, I figured out how to make stats temporarily disappear, and how to code trickier passages like Chapter 2′s assignment (which I still have nightmares about muddling through).

My point is, figure things out on a bare minimum need-to-know basis as you write. You’ll retain the knowledge better because you’re immediately putting it into practice. You may even think of new ways to code, although you might end up not being able to execute everything due to limitations in the coding language (press F for my abandoned night-mode blackout simulation).

Good luck on your project!

#Mind Blind #Interactive Fiction #Coding #Choicescript