It's been 9 months since I was in the midst of porting Dungeon (aka mainframe Zork) to Sharpee as a dogfooding process. Of course the infamous maze is within the game and works as expected. A couple of months ago I started working on Chord, a more natural

Apparently, not the Author. A post came through Planet IF this week about wrangling line breaks in Inform 7. It is a good post, in the sense that it accurately describes what an Inform author has to do. That is what bothers me about it. The setup is a bowl

Three things shipped together this week: Sharpee 5.3.0 on npm, Chord 3.6.0 (the story language), and Chord Writer 1.4.0 (the Mac app you write in). The last public release was 5.1.1 and Chord 3.3.0 in mid-August. Everything below happened

Admittedly, both Sharpee and Chord are still very young and cranky. I continually find seams in both through working with Chord. In my latest set of activities, I started to port my old Textfyre game, Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter, to Chord. I'd talked to Mike Gentry

Based on the requirements of two of my WIPs, I needed robust character and conversation systems. Normally these would be game-specific since the story dictates how dialogue is presented and executed. These two additions are general system implementations, but bring a great deal of potential to storytelling. I did

The Go-Live process took a few days, but we got there. Some housekeeping: * This is officially: * Sharpee version 5.0.0 * Chord Language 3.0.0 * Chord Writer (IDE) 1.0.0 * The DMG installer is for Apple silicon (M1-M5) only * The IDE requires Node 18+ and the

It has been exactly 27 days since I began designing and building the Chord language. In that time Sharpee (now referred to as the platform) has been scrubbed of many of its early cruft because creating Chord repeatedly exposed those seams. There were embarrassing event handlers that never acted and

A follow-up to the previous post about seeding and RNG madness. That work is done, but then I needed to figure out how an author creates tests in the IDE. My first reach was to copy Inform 7, but that doesn't really align with how I see