Update 6 - Now the monster can kill you
Content warning: Textual descriptions of gore and violence
Quick update today because I'm tired. But I think the monster's AI is complete now! Both the monster and the player have a health variable of 3 now, and the monster can now strike the player to take away a hit point. After three hits, the player getsa a game over!
There's an idea in horror writing that it's good to leave things to the audience's imagination, since whatever they imagine will always be wrose than whatever you can design. I want to take advantage of that, especially since player deaths will be gory (by dint of being maimed by a beast) and I don't really like gore myself. I feel that it's easy to be too lurid with gore, so that it becomes more gross than horrifying. I think "its claw splits you open" is exactly graphic enough. It's the only bit of writing I actually like here - the rest needs a redraft, maybe. "The monster finishes devouring the meat" is very clumsy in particular, and needs a rethink.
I've also started letting the player attack the wendigo. I think most attacks will be useless and you'll need to find a particular weapon or think of some other way to deal damage. There is an example in the Inform 7 documentation that will let you hook the pre-existing "attack" command up to items, which will make this work. Unfortunately, in practice it looks like this:
To be clear, it seems like you have to strip out every built-in synonym for "attack," redefine "attack" and then put all the synonyms back in again. I feel like there ought to be a better way.
By the way, note that the attack function doesn't actually do anything to hurt the monster yet. Poor player.
I've given the player character a tomahawk to test this code. I need to let the player throw the tomahawk at the monster as a way of attacking. I also think that maybe I shouldn't let the character start with the tomahawk in the final version of the game - I think I'll put it in the cave and make the player kite the monster around to buy time to get it.
Last thing I did was assign rooms to "regions," basically collections of rooms which you can ascribe properties to. I've not done anything with this yet, but it will help me later on - for example, I can add trees to "the forest region" so that they'll automatically be visible in every forested room, instead of me having to add trees to them individually. Plus, it makes the index map look pretty.
("Backstage" is the source code name for the Meat Dimension, which, again, it's fine.)
Tired of coding for now, so I think I'll fill out room descriptions and narrative details for my next job.