2012-11-04

Joust Conversion for Twine

Here is a conversion of Joust. This is another one of those games I copied from source in a book to learn how to program as a kid. Bringing these old games back to life is like paying my dues.

This is not a difficult game - you will play through it in just a few minutes. There is also not too much in the way of flavour text compared to other games. I'd rate it as about the same as Highnoon in terms of depth but the game play feels much less varied.

SPOILER: Once you work out a winning attack / defense combo then keep repeating it and let luck do the rest.

The game logic is entirely implemented in Twine/twee code. This could've been much simplified by using custom javascript macros to handle the logic branching or even by coding a "switch...case" macro system for twine to substitute for "ON X GOTO line, line ..." code from the original. I used if, else, endif blocks and despite being a bit complicated and verbose they did handle the task well enough.

Debugging something with such tricky logic wasn't easy but I used a couple of tricks. These might be useful to other Twine/twee code authors too.

TIP1: Debug nested if, else, endif blocks by copying into another text editor and indenting like a regular programming language.
Complex nesting of if, else, endif blocks can be annoying to debug. The are formatted in non-obvious ways to suit the needs of end display, not the programming. So, just for the purposes of debugging, try indenting it as if it is a programming language.

TIP2: Debug nested <<display>> chains with html comments. e.g. <html><!-- PassageNameX --></html>
Chasing around through multiple display macros gets hard. Add html comments to insert invisible stuff into the code so that you can inspect the page and track where the display macros are leading. It helps narrow down where the bugs are really quickly.

Checkout the other games I have converted

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