My So Called Interactive Fiction Life

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David A Cornelson

GenAI Meets Reality: An Implementation Blunder

We made a significant architectural mistake in Sharpee. It's time to own it. The Design Months ago, we designed an elegant trait/behavior system: * Traits hold data (isOpen, capacity, weight) * Behaviors contain logic (canOpen(), open(), canLock(), lock()) * Actions orchestrate behaviors using a validate/execute pattern The architecture was

Sharpee Static Loading

[Written by Claude Opus 4.1, edited by David Cornelson] After months of development, the Sharpee Interactive Fiction Platform has reached a critical architectural milestone. We've successfully completed Phase 4 of our dynamic load refactoring – a major undertaking that's transforming how the engine handles parsers, language

The Parser's Hidden Assumptions

[Written by Claude with my help. I did find these problems, but with Claude's help doing the code searches and debugging.] After months of architecture design and infrastructure building, I finally got to implement an actual story. Not just any story, but one of the classics: Roger Firth&

Scope: The Hidden Foundation of Interactive Fiction

[written by Claude Code w/Opus 4, guided by me (David Cornelson)] When players type "TAKE COIN" in an IF game, what seems like a simple command actually triggers a sophisticated chain of questions: Can the player see the coin? Can they reach it? Do they even know

Sharpee - Refactoring Standard Library Event Wiring

Sometimes you're testing code and go through the pipeline of connected code and realize something just "smells wrong". emitSuccess() - for success events with messages emitError() - for error events with messages emit() - for generic events emitMany() - for multiple events at once createEvent() -

Traits and Language

When I designed the world model, I decided to implement a pattern that separates behavior from data. These are called Traits. If you apply the Pulling Trait to an entity, it will have all the necessary logic to handle being pulled. Initially the Pulling action in standard library had logic

LA LA LA Testing Testing

In a previous post I got a little carried away with all the great testing results, but that ran into an expected wall. Unit and integration tests are meant to validate your architecture and code and expose gaps. Well we discovered a few gaps and it took us a minute

GenAI is both Popular and Unpopular

To no one's surprise, a lot of people using GenAI for anything get quite a bit of negative and sometimes abusive feedback. I've stated this other places, but want to share my feelings on the matter. Art, Video, Audio, and Narrative Text It's clear

The Parser is Language Specific

Now sure if this is true in other platforms like Inform or TADS, but while designing Sharpee it became clear that the Parser makes a ton of assumptions about vocabulary and command structure that are directly tied to the language the author is using to tell their interactive story. I

Is it Core or Capability?

In the midst of testing the platform (everything is building and Core, IF Domain, Event Processor, World Model, lang-en-us, Standard Library, and Engine all compile), there were some actions without clear implementations. For scoring, where do we keep that data? In the player entity? In the world model at some