The first mock up for the text based story engine. I'm using this to build a harvest moon style simulation (more emphasis on plants, less on NPC interactions).
Currently the game uses two emacs buffers. An "interface" buffer where you enter commands, and the timeline buffer that "renders" the world around you.
The timeline rendering is essentially done (still need to propertize / colour code the text). The interface parsing not so much. I may have to drop the pipes in the interface. Since the text is formatted as ess expressions, the functions need to be tightly coupled, rather than be orthogonal from one another in the unix sense. This would force the user to have a thorough understanding of the underlying data structure being passed to the function, not just knowledge of the functions themselves.