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Add/improve texts that describe internal organs (body parts) of game actors #95

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Mikolaj opened this issue Dec 28, 2018 · 0 comments

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@Mikolaj
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Mikolaj commented Dec 28, 2018

These are the idesc fields in this file: https://github.com/AllureOfTheStars/Allure/blob/master/GameDefinition/Content/ItemKindOrgan.hs#L50

The descriptions are expected to be rather concise and, more or less, justify or colour the stats/effects of the body parts. Usually, let's try to avoid second or first person ("you", "we") and let's limit that to backstory or plot texts, e.g., scenario texts. The descriptions should rather add to the mood, entertain, surprise the player, than move the plot forward or explain things in a boring, exhaustive way. Thus, by their brevity and quirkiness they build a counterbalance to the other game texts that must be long and exhaustive, if only to help new players (especially those new to roguelikes) not feel lost.

Only rare and crucial organs, e.g., those appearing exclusively in unique actors, can have longer descriptions and these can build up the backstory, give gameplay hints, etc. Examples of such rare organs are those that somehow define the actor they appear in, e.g., the Weld body part of the Welded Robot (but beware the same weld appears as embedded item in the Welded Staircase). Such texts should definitely consider the actor, not just the organ, and do that in the context of the gameplay/backstory/plot/mood. Some remarks about the theme and mood of Allure of the Stars are on the wiki, in particular at https://github.com/AllureOfTheStars/Allure/wiki/Content . But mostly just look at the other content. Playing the game a bit doesn't hurt either. Wikipedia is a good source of the biological data.

The organ descriptions are currently visible only in @ menus of own actors and in one of the item lore menus accessible from the dashboard. However, there are plans to hyperlink them from actor descriptions, including those appearing when aiming crosshair is over an actor. To see (most probably) all organ descriptions that can be generated in a game, run make fastCrawl (or the corresponding commandline from the Makefile, if you don't have make) and wait until the hero AI wins. Repeat if it loses.

If the description you have come up with requires some changes to the stats/effects of the organ, please feel free to suggest those, even in vague terms. That's especially true if you can cite Wikipedia or other source as a justification of the changed stats. Also, feel free to propose new organs. Any corrections to organ stats and to (currently dummy) weighs of organs and actor trunks (in ItemKindActor) are very welcome.

The texts are assumed to be licensed by their authors under BSD3. This should spare all of us us any legal headaches when moving and matching content bits between various free software games based on LambdaHack.

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