Feature Request: Non-Location Based Triggering

[quack8035]

It makes sense for the minimum viable product you have for now, but it seems like much of the “thinking” logic is tied to changes in location. Do you have any plans to permit a more flexible “trigger” system, such as by passage of time in a single location, for instance?

More generally, I guess, how much flexibility do you envision for hypothetical future designers of new game scenarios? Will a scenario author be able to define variables to be tracked, or specific story events that could be triggered by player actions (à la InfiniteWorlds.app)?

But very cool work for being this early in development!

[p-e-w]

Locations will likely remain the basic unit of narration, because they are an incredibly fundamental feature of reality, and virtually every story is naturally based around moving between them.

However, I am currently working on a plugin system that will allow others to hook into state transformations and observe/modify/override them, which will open up a vast array of additional possibilities, including everything you mentioned and much more.

If you have more detailed thoughts on this matter, don't hesitate to post them here.

[quack8035]

Fair enough. I guess I could imagine scenarios where the passage of time is the main unit of narrative progression rather than the movement between locations, or even (more limited) scenarios where the narrative would be broken into episodic chunks in the same location. If the idea is to allow flexibility through the engine or via plugins that seems reasonable.

Being able to observe/modify/override/trigger state transitions seems to make sense. In the current setup, for instance, it seems like there's basically a trigger ("Is the narrative progressing to a new location?") and a series of behind-the-scenes actions (generate new location information, conceive of new characters, etc.). In a scenario where you e.g. play as a shopkeep, I could imagine a different sort of trigger ("Has the conversation with the current customer ended and have they completed their purchase?" → conceive of a new customer, update the store's inventory, etc.). Just a hypothetical, but I could imagine it being hard to fit a narrative like that into a location-based trigger system.

[p-e-w]

In a scenario where you e.g. play as a shopkeep, I could imagine a different sort of trigger

That is undoubtedly true, but to be perfectly frank, I don't think the state-of-the-art is quite ready to support every possible scenario.

If everything is variable, then Waidrin would effectively become a programming language, and those already exist. Someone who wants complete freedom to create highly unusual scenarios, and process every bit of information exactly as they want, should probably just create their own LLM client.

Waidrin will become much more flexible in the future than it currently is, but I will not turn it into some kind of meta-platform where absolutely everything is possible. That platform already exists, and it's called an LLM API.