David A Cornelson

Phrase Algebra Fully Implemented * Sharpee 2.x replaces the entire text-rendering system. Text is no longer a string with embedded formatters; it's a tree of typed Phrase values that defer realization, rendered by one per-locale Assembler at the end of the turn. * The old formatter chain

There is still one glaring weakness in Sharpee directly related to separating logic from text emission. Sharpee is intentionally a developer-first/author-second platform and I've leaned into that design. I often use the words, "The Sharpee Way," when talking to Claude. As an exercise

If you hate GenAI, you probably want to skip this episode, though I would assume anyone reading my blog should already know what I do. Sharpee has been stable-ish for a few months. I bumped it to 1.0 and started revising the repository documentation. It occurred to me

Update: Even though the packages are working for most aspects of Sharpee, I am going through an alternate regression process and finding more issues. I'm already bumping it to 1.1.0 and likely to hit 1.2 this week. I restructured the Family Zoo tutorial to act

Even though the platform has been stable for a couple of months, it has shown gaps as I work on stories and extended use cases. One of those use cases was inspired by an intfiction.org thread which asked about multi-user play where two or more people could play

Back in January/February in the midst of porting Mainframe Zork (Dungeon) to Sharpee and burning the rough edges off of the platform, Claude did something weird. It inferred a working version of my envisioned Text Service that was not really my vision. But it was weird because it actually

All the latest updates to Sharpee are now in the npm registry. Package Description @sharpee/sharpee Main package — re-exports all platform packages @sharpee/core Core functionality — semantic events, save/restore contracts, random @sharpee/engine Runtime engine — game loop, command execution, turn management @sharpee/world-model World model — entities, traits,

Note: This blog post started as an outline generated by Claude, but the details are mine and the character system was worked out through long conversations with Claude in how NPCs might converse differently. I started with the requirement that the system support unreliable narrators. Eventually I realized that character

Overview Sharpee stories can emit audio events that clients render as sound effects, background music, and ambient soundscapes. Audio is optional — text clients ignore audio events, and stories without audio are unaffected. The audio system follows the same separation as text: stories emit intent, clients render output. Stories never reference

This post explains the data structures and algorithms behind Sharpee, a parser-based interactive fiction engine built in TypeScript. It's written for developers who learn best by seeing how CS concepts appear in real, working code rather than in textbook abstractions. Every decision I made from early 2024