Today was a snow day. For schoolkids, that means a day of freedom. For me, it means working most of the day on keeping the household running. I spent two hours with the tractor and the snowplow, clearing the driveway of snow. The driveway is about 3/8 of a mile long—about 600 meters. It takes four passes to clear all the snow. Then I had to go back with a snow shovel cleaning up places that the tractor can’t reach.
Then there was the wood stove; it had to be kept stoked all day long in case we lost power, a common occurrence in big snowstorms. I also spent an hour discussing interactive storytelling with a fellow in France. Then we found a great horned owl sitting in the doorway of the chicken coop in the duck pen. The wild animal rescue center couldn’t help, but I spent some time on FaceTime with a friend who is an expert on helping injured birds. We got the owl in a cage and brought it inside the house and covered it with a blanket. If he just hurt his wing, he might recover.
So I got very little real work done today. Yesterday was a very successful day. I am ready for the next big jump: building the engine that will execute the storyworld. I have a clear image in my mind of what this thing will do. It starts by selecting an encounter. The primary basis for selection is a random number, but this can be modified by Prerequisites, Disqualifiers, Consequences, a previous appearance of the same encounter, or the time window.
Once an encounter has been selected, it is presented to the player along with the options. The player selects an option, which then leads to the calculation of the reaction as well as calculations of changes in pValues towards Arthur. With these calculations made, the engine proceeds to the next encounter. Pretty simple, huh?