I want to put books and magazines in my text game. Would I be better off creating the book as a container with multiple pages or as a NPC who talks in pages? Is there a better way? This is my first attempt at text games and I may have bit off more than I can chew.

The first thing to consider is the player experience. What will the player type, and what will she then see. The standard way is a READ command.

>READ BOOK
You spend a few minutes reading the book.

You could have a menu asking the player which chapter to jump to. For a reference book you could set up a new command:

>LOOK UP INFLUENZA
You find "influenza" in the dictionary; a virys that makes you very poorly apparently.

Be aware that people will probably not appreciate having to read large amounts of text.

So the menu would be a script? Then I would create a "Turn to" or "Look up" command, right? I think I can do that.

Certainly reiterating what Pixie said in the previous post. I think the easiest way is to create a "table of contents" and allow the player to select where they want to go in the book.

The other way, if you want the player to turn the pages of the book, is to create a changing integer attribute on the book that can increase by one with a "turn page" command or a "read page"/"read book" command. You could even incorporate a "turn to page (x)" command to turn directly to a specific page. This is more difficult to create.

I guess it depends on how important it is for the book/magazine to have certain qualities. But, the simpler the better, I think. The less annoying the better. The less 'unimportant' text the better.

Anyway, there are certain advantages and disadvantages to each method I can think of, but I would be willing to help regardless of the path you choose. Just give us a little more information to go on and we can help more specifically. Good luck.

If you go to 'Quest - Tutorials and Templates' (http://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/ ... -templates), play the game, type 'move rooms', '8', '1', it will take you to a room where you see a working example of a 'homemade' menu. You can goof around there if you like and see how it works in-game, but if you type 'explain room', you will get a step-by-step guide on how to create what I did in that room. You can also download the .aslx file in the mentioned link in the game description to see how it is set up in the GUI.

Please ask if you have questions.

The Minnie script is perfect, thank you.