Problem with Interstitial Stories

I thought that it might be useful to try to implement an interstitial story, and I’m glad that I did, because the result was disturbing.

In the first place, the nice neat structure of interstitial stories in the original game – a single text file mixing text with commands – was messy to implement in SWAT. Fate must launch the first Verb, which in turn presents the player with (in this case) four options, each of which has about three options of its own. That’s a total of 17 Verbs that must be implemented to make a single insterstitial story work. I want to have at least 100 interstitial stories – that will mean 1700 verbs! Can SWAT handle that? What if I get 90 interstitial stories operational and then SWAT breaks down; what do I do then? And how can I navigate through that many Verbs? Will the Verb list become impossible to use?

Next, there’s a problem with implementation: Storyteller cuts off the text after about 30 characters. I can’t display long text in the current version of Storyteller. I suppose that I can overlook this problem until after I get funded; I can understand Storyteller with truncated text and with money I can get the thing fixed.

But there’s also a third problem: the main game is played with Eeyal and the interstitial stories are told in plain text. How in the hell is that going to work? It’s just going to have to be handled with custom code.