Romeo and Juliet Game Post-Mortem

An anonymous reader writes "Gamasutra is running a post-mortem on an interactive love story that was written by students. They were attempting a solution to the game designer's challenge from the GDC 2004. From the article: Interaction with video games is currently done at an almost entirely rational level. The player may react to a game emotionally, but the game will never know about it, and thus, never respond to it. We wanted to change this, and have the player interact with the game solely through his own emotions."

Comments

The declaration/types issue

[fm6]

As a matter of fact, variables don't have type, only the value that they contain does. This has its advantages. For instance, you can do things like assigning the name of a function to a variable, and then executing it by adding parentheses, for instance. It also has major disadvantages, making a typo in a variable name will create a new variable, and on top of that, Lua will not throw an error. This isn't such a big deal with a small codebase, or when the domain of Lua's use in a game is limited, but when a large portion of the game is written in Lua's, it can became a hassle. Often times, a member of the team would make a seemingly simple change, only to be greeted by Romeo and Juliet standing still on the stage, doing nothing, with naught a peep from Lua.

This is the same issue I have with with Python and (to a lesser extent) Perl. Neither language enforces any kind of type checking. Python objects don't even have types as such -- you just add or remove members as you need them. And Python doesn't provide a way to declare variables, so you have to be a very careful typist.

Some very successful applications have been writen in Perl and Python, so obviously there are good programmers who like self-discipline better than languages with anti-Murphy features. But a lot of us are not like that. Something to remember when you chose a language for a project.

Game has a web site

[fm6]

Here.. No downloads yet.