Separating out choices for multiple characters

momohax

Hi all, sorry I'm only just dipping my toe into the world of all this coding stuff, but before I sink hours into figuring out how to operate this system I was hoping someone could tell me if it's even possible to do what I'm attempting.

Basically what I want is a story where the player picks one of four characters at the start, and from then on they can only see the choices available to their character, but I want to have all the characters' stories within the same narrative, (so it splits out and then comes back to shared events and experiences over and over.)

I was imagining that this would work like, say Player A chooses Bob and Player B chooses Gary, if I write a scene where Gary and Bob walk into a room, Player A will see Bob's options to say - open a chest, and Player B will see Gary's options - say to talk to an NPC, but neither will see both.

Does that make sense? Sorry if this is a dumb question, I tried doing this in inklewriter and I had to keep making the player re-choose what character they were before I could give them separate choices (see below image) and it was really clunky.

Thanks heaps in advance!

greyelf

You need to state which Story Format you are using when you ask as question, as answers can be different for each one.

note: Each person will be seeing their own copy of your story HTML file, and unless you code your own web-server functionality then the choices made by one person have no effect what so ever on those made by another person.

You can use $variables and IF macros to control what a player sees based on which character they selected. The following examples use the Harlowe syntax:

a. Store which Character was selected by the player:

(set: $player to "Bob")

b. Display content in a passage based on which Character the player selected:

(if: $player is "Bob")[
''What ever you want the Bob character to see''

](else-if: $player is "Gary")[
''What ever you want the Gary character to see''

](else:)[
''Something has gone wrong because the players is an unknown Character''

]