Is there a way to skip areas of a game for testing?

iron_freak220
Hi all, I'm very new to Quest and text adventure games in general so I hope this isn't an obvious question. I was wondering though, is there a way to skip through parts of your game that you know are already working when testing?

For example, my game currently has 4 intro pages of text. Now I know that's not a huge hassle in and of itself, but having to go through those 4 pages every time I want to see if I can successfully take out a shirt from a drawer or read a book, etc, starts to add up. And then when I get further into the game development, I will have to go through those 4 intro pages, plus all the other puzzles I've created just to get to where I want to test something small.

Is there a way to just skip all of that? So I could start testing from the room I am currently working on? Or do I have to just rush through the game really quick to test the new areas?

Thank you for your help. I did a search and couldn't find anything relevant but if there is a link with the answer, feel free to post.

george
I don't think there is unfortunately. The closest you'll get is walkthroughs. http://quest5.net/wiki/Walkthroughs

jaynabonne
You have control over the code, so code it that way. :)

If you have your intro paragraphs in a "title" room, where you move the player to the main start room after they have seen the paragraphs, then you can simply have your player start in the start room instead of in the title room. Or basically whatever you do after all the intro stuff, just skip directly to it.

If you could show code for your situation, I could be more specific.

tbritton
On the intro paragraphs you will have to remove them from the game. Do not just comment them out since Quest will remove the text once you use the GUI (I know from personal experience). Copy the intro to notepad.

As Jaynabonne said you can move the player (and any objects you need) to start in any room you want. What I do when I have attributes or flags I need to set before I can continue is create an object that when I use it, all of the attributes and flags I need will be set. You'll end up with quite a few of these in the game so use a consistent name and you can easily strip them out when you're done.

iron_freak220
Ok, I see. So there's not a way to 'fast forward' but there are work arounds, such as removing the intro text temporarily and moving the player to different rooms with an attribute/flag object.

Awesome! Thanks for the help y'all.

tbritton
This may also help: http://quest5.net/wiki/Walkthroughs

TriangleGames
Another method I've used is to put the game's title-screen, intro text, etc. into a function called "INTRO," then when I'm done testing the game, I just add "Call Function: INTRO" to the game's start script. That way I can "store it" throughout the rest of my design work while keeping it inside the game file.

tlk
Skipping the intro seems to be well covered by now, but something else I do a lot for testing is to use commands to warp around. Let's say you start on the porch of a house but you want to test something in the basement, which it takes 50 turns in your game to even get into. As long as nothing that happens on those turns is important for what you're trying to test, you can just make a command in the porch room with the pattern "basement" and set the script to move the player object to the basement room (you can also set flags and attributes using it too, if necessary). Then all you have to do is type "basement" at the start of your game and boom, you're there, no time wasted.

...Obviously you'd want to delete any commands like that before publishing the game, heh.

Liam315
tlk wrote:..but something else I do a lot for testing is to use commands to warp around.

That's what I do as well. It's really useful although if you have objects you'll need from earlier in the game you have to remember to move them to the player in the command as well as any attribute changes, flags etc. That in and of itself can get a little tedious (you sometimes end up having to test your warp command!) but it's far better than going through the whole thing from the start.

Eaten By A Grue
I'm just learning Quest and here's something I came up with. I made a developer room that's accessed by going up from the starting location, and from this room you can exit in all directions to other areas of the game. You can also set up any complicated puzzle or interaction in the room so that you can test it quickly, then once it's working how you want you can move it to the correct room later on. Because my game involves learning spells I also made a cheat sheet item you can use to learn all the spells right off. I like this method because it's really easy do just with things you can learn in the tutorial (I'm still puzzling out attributes and that kind of thing.) All you have to do is get rid of the exits when you're ready to release the game.

HegemonKhan
another simple method for just a single time at the start of the game with intro messages, is to make a "Do you want to skip the intro?" scripting, if 'no', then message~display your intro messages:

<object name="game">
// blah attributes~tags~scripts
<attr name="start" type="script">
show menu ("Do you want to skip the intro?", split ("yes,no", ";"), false) {
if (result = "yes") {
msg ("You skip the intro.")
} else if (result = "no") {
// your intro message scripts
}
}
</attr>
// blah attributes~tags~scripts
</object>

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