Is there a simple way to have one of the amusing a victorious player options (UNDO, RESTART, RESTORE, QUIT, AMUSING, AFTERWORD, etc.) allow the player to play an extra scene? A deleted scene, as it were? If not, one way around it would be to give them a password to unlock the scene.
Instead of using “end the game saying” or whatever, just emulate this with the “say” command, giving them the specific options.
If [conditions for victorious]
move the player to End Game;
say “*** YOU HAVE WON***[paragraph break]You have a score of [score] out of 350.[line break]Would you like to UNDO, RESTART, RESTORE, AMUSING?”.
instead of doing anything other than amusing while the player is in End Game, say “Please choose UNDO, RESTART, RESTORE, or AMUSING.”.
Amusing is an action applying to nothing. Understand “amusing” as amusing.
Check amusing: if player is not in end game, say “That is not a verb I recognise.” instead.
Carry out amusing: [do whatever]
It might well be that you’ll find what you’re looking for in the Inform Recipe Book, 11.6 - Ending the story.
The table is severely messed up in this post, of course, but it gives you a general idea. It seems as though it would be as easy as adding entries to the aforementioned table.
Peter Pears is on the right track about how to do this if you don’t want to just fake the ending. You may also want to know about the “resume the game” phrase, which tells Inform to let the player continue playing after achieving a death state. There’s an example here. So you’ll probably want to
– add an option to the death options, possibly one that is only triggered when the player wins the game
– have that option kick off a rule
– have the rule change the world state around a bit to set up the “deleted” scene so it’s ready for the player to play
– “resume the game” so that the game becomes interactive again and the player isn’t stuck in the end-question state.
One caveat: I suspect that if you do this, after the player has tried the deleted scene, UNDO from the final question state will put him back in that deleted scene again, not let him re-enter the main game right before he won. I don’t know if that’s likely to be a problem.
Oh, so that’s the sort of situation in which “resume the game” is useful. I was wondering about that!
This totally makes me want to have a game where you die in the first 5 moves, and get reincarnated.
(Much) older games used to do this kind of thing more often: you couldn’t UNDO the turn that killed you, but you’d be transported to an afterlife area, penalized in some way, but allowed to resume the game with a reduced score or some items missing that you had to retrieve or something along those lines.
There are still games that do that, though not IF games.
I was thinking more of a game where dying and being reincarnated is part of the plot. The first scene of the game is essentially inescapable; then, after you die, you come back as somebody else.
Thanks Peter and Emily – I’d seen 11.6 but wasn’t sure what could be done with it. “Resume the story” seems like an especially nice way to do it. You can throw a flag or something to start the bonus scene when you resume the story, and you could also set a password so a player could trigger the bonus scene from within the game.
Hertz: I’m going to have to spoiler the game title (though this aspect of the game becomes clear very quickly), but have you played
Adam Cadre’s Shrapnel?