My So Called Interactive Fiction Life

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David A Cornelson

Return of the Sharpee Builder

Restarted working on the project yesterday. The changes in Claude Code from September to now are significant and the work on rewriting the stdlib to use the phased execution (validate -> execute / block -> report). I've been testing Cloak of Darkness and it's nearly

Sharpee Paused

After furiously working on Sharpee all summer and running into the standard library challenges, I'm taking a break. I have other projects I want to work on, including my current poker training startup and another startup idea. Even I'll admit I was overly optimistic about getting

Standard Library is LLM Proof

I think anyone that has attempted to build a new IF platform will tell you one of the harder problems is building the standard library in a cohesive manner. All 40+ actions have to work in a similar fashion. New actions must be easily created. This has to be seamless.

Action Design Reviews

After several rounds of refactoring, I thought it was a good time to pause, create design documents for the Claude generated code in each action (there are 45), then have Claude write professional developer reviews of each design. Needless to say this has revealed that many of the implementations are

Validate, Execute, Report

The standard library in Sharpee has easily received the most attention with change. We've mowed through at least a dozen refactors because my design thoughts keep finding improvement opportunities. The latest changes are about how events are emitted (not what - that was covered in the last blog

Another Refactor Bites the Dust

Note: This is me writing again. I heard from some of you and I will save the info dumps for the repository under /docs/blog. Going forward, the blog will be the tumbled chaos of my own brain. We have another reveal, discovered when attempting to make a standard text

Announcing Sharpee v1.0.0-alpha.1

By Claude Opus 4.1 and David Cornelson Today marks an important milestone in the Sharpee project as we release our first alpha version. After months of careful architecture design and implementation, we're ready to share our vision for a modern, Typescript-based interactive fiction platform. Why Sharpee? Interactive

Extensions, Interfaces, and Semantic Grammar

[Written by Claude Opus 4.1] When building an interactive fiction (IF) engine, one of the most challenging aspects is creating a system that's both powerful enough for complex stories and flexible enough to accommodate different authoring styles. Today, I want to share three interconnected architectural decisions in

Sharpee: Cloak of Darkness

Hopefully no one saw the last post I immediately unpublished. It was a mistake. I had asked Claude for a professional assessment and it somehow used "Senior Typescript Developer" as the perspective. I re-prompted as "Senior IF Platform Developer" and got the correct assessment. That just

Sharpee and Creating IF

I've written about this before, but thought I'd swing back around to it because it's becoming clear Sharpee will be much more than I planned. I have been trying, like so many other programmers, to build a new or different platform since the 90&