Thanks, I’m glad I was able to give you the kind of idea you were looking for, and that someone is going to try to implement this idea.
I’m also considering changing the setting to make it an alien world which just happens to be very much like 17th century England
Good—that’s what I was trying to get at. For example, you would want a completely different night sky; you don’t want the gamer to be able to spot the Big Dipper (or Southern Cross for our Aussie friends) and then be able to use existing ephemeris (ephemeral?) data. The planet should have a different tilt, or perhaps be the moon of another planet, so the player can’t just say, “LOL, I know the heliocentric model, my planet is orbiting the sun, problem solved!”
Different magnetic field too, so they can’t just say, “lol, make a compass, it points north”.
I’m skeptical, though, about how well text-based IF can accomplish this—the text-only interface is really constraining, and would have to tell the user all of the salient elements explicitly. I would be glad to help on the project in any way I can, though I’m still learning complex programming myself.
Also, something to motivate the storyline would be like: You need to come up with better cannonballs for the navy (i.e. have to identify what increases a metal’s yield energy). Or come up with a way of detecting counterfeit coins.
Thanks, I’m glad I was able to give you the kind of idea you were looking for, and that someone is going to try to implement this idea.
Good—that’s what I was trying to get at. For example, you would want a completely different night sky; you don’t want the gamer to be able to spot the Big Dipper (or Southern Cross for our Aussie friends) and then be able to use existing ephemeris (ephemeral?) data. The planet should have a different tilt, or perhaps be the moon of another planet, so the player can’t just say, “LOL, I know the heliocentric model, my planet is orbiting the sun, problem solved!”
Different magnetic field too, so they can’t just say, “lol, make a compass, it points north”.
I’m skeptical, though, about how well text-based IF can accomplish this—the text-only interface is really constraining, and would have to tell the user all of the salient elements explicitly. I would be glad to help on the project in any way I can, though I’m still learning complex programming myself.
Also, something to motivate the storyline would be like: You need to come up with better cannonballs for the navy (i.e. have to identify what increases a metal’s yield energy). Or come up with a way of detecting counterfeit coins.