Ta da! Key Interceptor 1.1! Demo included!

[Mark Thern]

Spaghetti Code Productions is proud to present Key Interceptor 1.1! With its patented Bulletproof (tm) technology, typing errors are a thing of the past!

Bonus! A short demonstration, "Murder in Washington D.C." is included! The chilling sequel to the Ren'py demo game!

There were a couple of issues that I couldn't figure out.

1. Is it possible for Ren'py to detect if the caps lock is on and then disable it? It would make a nice safety feature.

2. To get the parser to work the way I wanted to, I had to divide up the input sequence into 2 parts, verb = my_input and noun = my_input. I'd like to give the user the ability to press backspace and jump back to the verb phase when he's in the noun phase and he hasn't typed any input. I have what looks like a good solution to me in the code, but it doesn't work. It's in line 96.

3. I've implemented text buttons, but despite trying a number of schemes, I couldn't get them to actually do anything. I'd like for the user to be able to click on them to enter the keywords.

I hope you enjoy the demo. It was a lot funnier in my head than what ended up on the page, which is one reason why it's so short.

[absinthe]

Interesting.

My first impression is that it's kind of awkward. At first, I couldn't figure out why the interface wasn't responding, and then I kept forgetting to hit the capslock on and off. I did find I was getting quite quick with it after the first somewhat embarrassing attempts.

It's involving, too, in a weird way -- but I kept getting distracted from the actual text of the story since I had to keep looking at the interface to see which key corresponded to which available action (of course, this'd get easier with familiarity), and then down to the keyboard to figure out where the key I was going to hit next was. Then realize it was time for the spacebar prompt, then pick a noun...

Admittedly, most people may be swifter on the uptake on this than I am.

I guess I'm just not sure what the point is. I can definitely see potential for the concept of choosing verb/noun pairs when interacting with an NPC, but why not just have click-links in that case?

Eh, just my two cents, I tend to ramble.

[Mark Thern]

You had some trouble with having to capitalize certain words? I was afraid of that. Most parsers don't require you to capitalize anything. I considered making it so that the parser would accept either 'e' or 'E' for 'Eileen', but that's a complicated problem and I decided I needed more feedback before I went to the trouble.

I am confused about one thing. You say you had trouble remembering to use the caps-lock. The user isn't supposed to be pressing the caps-lock at all. To capitalize a word, all he has to do is press shift plus the letter he wants to capitalize. Did you get confused by my remark about wanting to disable the caps-lock as a safety feature?

I could have put the story text in the menu box, but my design calls for both the story text and the interface to remain on the screen at all times. I'll definitely put the story text closer to the interface in any case.

The reason why I need a text driven input scheme is that my game has more keywords than can be comfortably displayed at one time. Because of that, it's necessary to divide the keywords up into categories, and it takes three clicks to navigate to a specific keyword, ie People-->
Families--> Hishida. If the user knows the exact keyword that he wants to use, he can skip all that by typing 'Hishida' at the prompt. That said, I do plan to allow users to click on keyword buttons. I just couldn't figure out how to make that feature work with the Key Interceptor class.

Thanks for the feedback.