In the process of porting Chord Writer to a cross-platform editor and a very old BASIC IF story from 1981 to Chord, I started seeing sizable gaps in the syntax. I've spent probably a month or more updating Chord (and Sharpee to support it) and that work

In the coming version 4.0.0 of Chord, I've added a type that allows the author to create oceans, large terrains, and open caverns with multiple visitation points. Also known as a grid or matrix, in Chord it's called an expanse. With an expanse comes

Four months after Phrase Algebra and Sharpee 2.0, the algebra has grown from 13 kinds to 16. Two of my June examples were never valid syntax, and the Optional and Choice examples contradicted ADR-196, accepted the same day: those two are built in code, never written in a

I'm on the verge of updating Chord to 4.0.0 with changes inspired or more accurately exposed by trying to port an old game that no one has ever played outside of my high school. I'd talked about the problem in my last post. As

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