Testing game from certain points

OurJud
If my constant barrage of questions is unacceptable, please let me know.

Is there a way I can check my game's functionality and/or appearance at a given location?

At first, it was no problem just hitting 'play' and following through one or two locations from the beginning until I got to the place I wanted to see working. But now, I'm having to go through multiple pages to get to the place I want to check on.

I would like to be able to load the game at a particular point, rather than having to manually play through the game from the start to get there.

george
Are you using the desktop Quest or the web Quest?

OurJud
I was using the online, but I've just this second finished copying it over to the desktop version, and shall be using that from here on in.

george
There's not a built-in way to do that as far as I know. There are Walkthroughs for text adventures. Supposedly there's a record button to create walkthroughs in-game but looking just now I didn't see one.

Anyway, for gamebooks it looks like you'd have to create your own solution but I could be wrong.

OurJud
I hope there is a way, as the further into the game I get, the more of issue checking the later stages of its functionality could become.

The mapping of one location to another isn't really a problem, as that can be controlled and checked from the UI, but when it comes to checking that scripts are working how they should, you really need to test it in game, don't you?

george
Yes I agree 100%.

As a temporary measure, you can move the player to whatever page you want to start from there (by dragging the player object in the GUI from page to page). However if earlier scripts set important information that won't work very well.

Just thinking out loud, gamebooks are made up of code objects, where the choices/links are properties of those objects. So in theory it would be possible to write code that goes through each object, finds a choice, goes to the next object, etcetera, running the scripts along the way, and stopping if it hits an error. That way you could automatically test the project. Then you could add that to the gamebook UI. I think it'd be a decent sized project in itself though.

HegemonKhan
could you just test the code in a new text adventure version game too? and~or you could just post the code here, and we can check if it will work or not, too.

The Pixie
You can:

1. Temporarily move the player object to a different room or page later in the game
2. Create a temporary exit or link from the start to a different room or page later in the game
3. For a text adventure only, create a walkthrough (click walkthrough at the bottom of the left pane, then click add in the right, give it a name, and click "record")

As george says, if game state changes, then you need to take account of that for both 1 and 2, either modifying the attributes on the player, or have a script on the exit make any necessary changes.

Silver
If it was parser based you could go. through. the. tedious. actions. by. placing. full. stops (periods). after. each. command.

Unless that's been fixed.

Avantar
I had a pretty large game that I needed to test from different places and points in character progression.
I would surely follow The Pixie's advice. It worked best for me in conjunction with making commands. (Call them cheat codes if you will)
If i wanted more HP, another piece of armor, more money or more experience - I had a command for it.

It gets tedious changing the stats or attributes on your character manually and sometimes you forget to take it off again. I say combine cheat codes, moving the player to another room for start-up and use walkthroughs
I used a walkthrough to do my character creation quick and painless and changing the location, attributes, armor and the rest, I used command scripts.

OurJud
Thanks for all the tips. At my level, I very much like The Pixie's idea of creating temporary 'jump' links that will take me to the point I need to test. Seems the easiest solution all round.

Silver
What would also help is that you build your game in self contained chunks. So chunk a might be three locations but nothing you do there sets any scripts that effect anything in chunk b which has a few more locations. so then you could easily bypass chunk a to test from the start of chunk b.

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