Word Quest Online

The Simplest Particle

Today marks a great day. In September of 2019, I set out to make a MMORPG that would help people learn to write and produce beautifully told, compelling stories in a fun and engaging way.

I wanted NPCs that would interact in a realistic manner and whose needs, like real human beings, would drive their behaviors and fuel their interactions with our player characters.

The project was complex. The scope huge. I didn't even know enough to know where to begin creating such a thing.

In March of 2020, I decided to start learning to code because I couldn't get the people I did know who could code to join my merry little band. That has been a massive learning curve.

After spending the last 9 months studying Genesis 1 as if it were an instruction manual in coding, I had a breakthrough: Break the big, giant thing down into the smallest particle and move forward from there.

I studied Genesis 1: 3-5. It can be replicated with two boolean variables, Light and Darkness, a string variable called Time. You simply create a method that determines whether light is true and sets time to "day" and sets time to "night" when darkness is true. Simple. Elegant.

Testing that function is a matter of creating a second script attached to a text output that updates whenever the toggle method does.

That being accomplished, I was equipped to begin the big, hairy, daunting project by asking myself: What was the simplest thing that the NPC needed to be able to do? What did it need to do that would affect every other system that I would put into place?

My answer: Determine whether or not there were needs present for the player to meet.

That led me to writing a need test script, which would create a flag if there were needs present and remove it if there weren't.

I don't have anything else working yet - but that functionality is now present and it exists and works beautifully. There is a lot more to work on and a lot more to do, but progress can be made from here.

Progress is being made. I still have to get all the buttons and functions hooked up and working, but the Character Creator for stage 1 of the app is working.

Remember: This is NOT the game, but it will be the backend of the game. Getting this figured out and working will help us to implement some standard features I wanted to implement in the live game.

One of those features was the ability for people to add characters, settings, and plot points from their own books into the game.