Narrat

Narrat is an interactive fiction game engine · By Liana

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Question: player choice rollback, page clear and go back to previous pages

A topic by komehara created Jul 13, 2024 Views: 126 Replies: 2

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komehara142 days ago

Hello, I’m considering different interactive fiction engines for my next game, and one limitation I noticed with ChoiceScript (by Choice of Games) was the lack of rollback ability. Since besides, text is shown per page (page changes after each choice), it makes it impossible to both rollback to change a choice, and simply do a read-only rollback to check what has been said (what Renpy calls “fixed rollback”). And it has not text log either.

On the Narrat demo, I see that all previous text is still available on the huge scrollable area by scrolling up, so at least we have access to what has been said.

The remaining questions are:

is it possible to truly rollback to make different choices?
is there a manual command to clear pages after a while, to start text from the top again (I use this in Renpy NVL mode for new pages and new chapters) - and in this case, if there a way for the player to still read what was on previous pages? (whether read-only or true rollback)

I’m surprised this is the first topic, the engine seems promising! I see some issues on GitHub but I need to know if it exists first before opening a feature request.

I also see a bug related to choices but that’s another issue so I’ll open a bug on GitHub for that.

LianaDeveloper142 days ago (1 edit)

Rollback: I'm not sure, the idea of doing a rollback on choices seems pretty game-specific in terms of how it would actually work? You can definitely do things in scripts to jump back to a label and let someone take a choice again or something, depends what you actually have in mind
There's a command to clear previous text from the history, if that's what you mean. There are no pages, text is in one scrollable log

Also it's the first topic because there's a narrat forum, and generally I haven't seen much interaction with the engine on itch.io, so I haven't touched that page a lot. https://narrat.discourse.group/

https://narrat.dev/

komehara142 days ago

Thanks, I’ll check the Discourse forum next time then.

Otherwise I’m talking about general rollback like Renpy (it takes more work when dealing with animations, but for text-only games + static graphics that seems more doable).

I saw the save system in action in Spoon Survival so that should be OK for “big rollbacks”, while scrolling up is good to check what has been said. The only issue left is if player messes up a single choice.

OK so text can be cleared but then there is no way to see what was there before unless loading an old save.

I’ll play with the engine a bit so I can tell what I really need. So far my novel has been linear so I didn’t have issues with choices and only cared about pages. But I could decide that I only clear the text content on new chapters, and offer player to save game before each chapter so they can easily access to the full story if needed.