Since the previous tutorial, I added a bunch of products to each of the business locations. This was mostly just filling things out with extra content. The one interesting technique was that all of the animal products at Anderson’s farm are available year-round, but they each have a 90% chance of occurring, so often they’ll be “out of stock” of one or two of them.
But you’ll want to start from the updated example (Twee code) or at least add a “broccoli” product to Fairweather Farm.
So far we have used exclusively sticky cards, to represent physical objects and locations. But for pieces of story, you’ll more typically use single-use cards so you don’t show individual stories more than once. Let’s do some of that: we’ll add some flavor text about what other customers are doing.
As with the current product listing, we’ll re-use the code for all the businesses. Create a passage called “product story”.
<<set _productstory to true>>\
<<set _storycards to QBN.cards(1)>>\
<<unset _productstory>>\
The argument to QBN.cards tells it to randomly select that many
cards (if possible) instead of returning all of them. Then if we
found a story, we display it.
<<if _storycards.length>>
<<includeall _storycards>>
<</if>>
Now we’ll include this passage in all three businesses, and test that it works with no stories.
And then let’s add some stories about broccoli. Start by opening
the broccoli passage and setting a temporary variable that we can
match against: <<set _broccoli to true>>. Then create a new
passage, tag it with card, req-productstory and
req-broccoli. We could also say req-location-eq-fairweather,
but since they’re the only ones selling broccoli I’ll leave it
out. Then let’s write the contents:
A woman in her 60s stops short. Is that organic broccoli? Look
at that //color//! That's the most beautiful broccoli I've
ever seen! I'll have to buy some for my dog: he //loves//
broccoli.
We’ll also give the passage a title so you can tell what it is from outside: I called it “Broccoli for the dog”. Then let’s test it. Drive to Fairweather in January: there should be no broccoli and no story. Go back home, advance to April, then go back to Fairweather. There should now be broccoli and the story should show up.
Since it’s a single-use card it should only show up once. So if we
start to drive away and then get back out of the car, there should
still be broccoli but no story. If a product shows up instead, it
probably means that your current products code didn’t unset the
_product variable. Temporary variables are visible everywhere
in the current “moment” (all included passages and everything,
until you follow a link to another passage).
Let’s add a couple more, making a new passage for each:
A large black pickup truck parks outside and a
broad-shouldered man in a torn sweatshirt enters the store.
"Oh good, they //do// have broccoli today. I got a nice piece
of sharp cheddar at Anderson's and I'm craving cream of
broccoli soup."
And:
A young couple meanders through the store. One turns to the
other. "How about we make beef and broccoli tonight? We have
those steak tips in the fridge that we need to use."
Now those cards can be randomly shown (once each) any time when there is broccoli. You could also make stories about dishes that need multiple ingredients: broccoli-spinach quiche, or kale-potato soup. Just remember to set temporary variables in each ingredient card so you can tell when they’re available.
I think this is about as far as I’m going to take this example. Hopefully it’s enough to get you started even though it’s still just a setting rather than a story with any kind of plot.