The Princes of the Golden Cage

[Temmon]

Inspired by the eponymous book by Nathalie Mallet (I found it at a used bookstore a few years ago), although if I ever release it in any fashion, I'm going to change the name. In the book, the 100+ male children of a sultan are locked up in a palace until the sultan dies, the top ranked heir is named the new sultan and, probably, he kills his remaining brothers in order to secure his position on the throne.

I'm using it as my rough inspiration, because it makes for a nice constrained world with a ton of opportunities for conflict. The goal is to have a population of N characters who will interact with the procedurally generated palace and the other NPCs while raising their rank and/or trying to stay alive.

Because I wanted to focus on the intercharacter dynamics and the actual world building, I'm using the Curveship Interactive Fiction engine which, since it hadn't been updated since 2005, I spent a few days before November just getting to run in Python3.6 and figuring out how it works. It's amazing at handling the narration, setting tense and POV (which makes it feel a little cheaty, but, oh well). But the underlying architecture is kind of bulky and I'm pretty sure the author didn't use Python as their primary language when they first started, because the core of it has a distinctly Java->Python feel. I'll probably put in a PR for it at some point with my updates to Python3 at least, but given that it's been abandoned since 2005...

I'm working on nanowrimo proper as well, but I've been finding that dropped as I focus more on my nanogenmo. I'm a professional programmer and a very amateur writer.

Completed:

• Figuring out how the damn thing works.
• Implementing my own Actor subclass to play characters
• Getting my actors to eat and drink on their own
• Implementing a global Tick action in order to handle internal clocks
• Making my actors hungry and thirsty, and then using food and drink to refill them
• Dynamically generating the palace, thus far a set of empty rooms with a food table and a water jug

My goals (in a rough priority order, but a lot of them are interchangeable):

• Assign more verbose descriptions to rooms and actions. Right now actions are classic IF "You look at the room. Peter and Susan are in the room. There is a jug of water and a table with food." I'd like it to be more something like "You look at the expansive dining room. The walls are covered with rich tapestries featuring battles from years gone by. The floors are an intricate mosaic that sweeps across the room in no clear pattern, but provides a sense of calm order. Your siblings Peter and Susan are in the room. Peter can't be trusted. He attacked you yesterday. Susan is a trustworthy friend of yours. Etc" The room descriptions will be a combo of procedural and hard-coded writing. Rooms and items will probably be assigned random attributes on creation and then those will be filled out using templates that I write. Characters will draw on the character history and possibly a rough physical description system (although given that that's mostly/entirely cosmetic, it would probably be an easy add).
• Give actors a "memory" of the actions they've seen
• Have actors gossip (share knowledge of actions they've encountered), praise (attempt to increase the praisee's opinion of them) and insult (attempt to decrease opinion)
• Handle food and drink better (right now, I think there's a single water object. That works in classic IF where there's a single bottle to put it in. But I want my actors to be able to store food and water. This might require making a lightweight Item class or something like that. Definitely will require core code modification. I also want to give them descriptions. I wrote a random food and drink generator for shiggles earlier this year that I'm going to steal for that.
• Implement a ranking system. Every actor knows where their position in the hierarchy is and where the others are in turn. Not sure if it's going to be magically transmitted or if they're going to have to explicitly find an item.
• Add more stats and skills to train, and ways to express them
• Actors creating and breaking promises to each other. Peter promises to give Susan a key to a training room if she'll give him some of the food she's carrying. She gives him the food, but he doesn't give her the key. His opinion of her rises. Her opinion of his falls.
• Assign a comfort score to various rooms according to where positive and negative things happened to them and where they spend most of their time. This might go hand and hand with a more explicit way to claim rooms
• Implement pathfinding as well as random walking.
• Create peepholes and windows to let actors spy on each other

It's a lot of work. It's an ambitious project. If I get the descriptions to feel more novely, I'll feel more like I'm winning and I might focus on that. I mean, right now I could trivially generate 50k words worth of Jordan heads east to room. There's a table in the room. Jordan heads north to room. Jordan is feeling hungry. It just wouldn't be particularly interesting. I'd like to at least make it more varied. I'll see how much of my wishlist I can actually get to. The NPCs interacting with each other is a very interesting subject to me though, so I'll probably be coming back to that frequently. My immediate next step, I think, is going to be getting more objects in the world and seeding the rooms more interestingly.

[cpressey]

I'm using the Curveship Interactive Fiction engine which, since it hadn't been updated since 2005

Just as a point of pedantry, I think 2005 might be the year the project started? The last update in nickmontfort/curveship is March 31, 2011, and the first commit in that repo, dated February 2, 2011, has the commit message "First git commit after ~5 years of development".

So that's 7 years of bitrot, rather than 13. Not that it makes much practical difference.