Wanderer Branch Concept

You begin as a wanderer, unsure of your past. Much of your memory has evaporated; you're in a cave. Blood is in the air, danger crackles about you. You want to go down...deep. You need to. You have a smattering of equipment and a case. Inside is a writing set and a plain, empty book. Compulsively, you begin to write:

//player writes any background or story so far information here:

You put away your writing set and briefly flip through the strange journal. New pages have appeared! The new pages are of a slightly different color from the the ones you've written on. And there is one new page for each used page. Enough musings, it's time to wander...

So, this concept is really a showcase for new journalling features. I'm a big fan of Haran's notetaking patch for the following reasons:
1. I sometimes like to play "in character", writing my characters thoughts as I go.

2. Writing my actions down helps me reenforce new tactical ideas.

3. The notetaker is nice for tracking bugs and learning about the game's features because it tracks the turn number with the note. Thus, I can calculate how long it takes to get hungry, or to heal, or how long a spell lasts very easily, and, more importantly, while playing.

Now, I want to be able to describe my environment while I'm playing as well. Name the rats. Describe each one. Make jokes about them. But I don't want to leave the dungeoncrawl game in order to do these things. No Alt-tabbing to an editor program, or chardumping then Ctrl-Xing to a prompt. I want to stay "in" dungeoncrawl as much as possible.

And I want to import other people's writings as well. Assuming there are like-minded individuals out there.

So in the future, when I <'x','?'> a giant bat I might see:
A huge black bat.
Or I might see,
A huge, angry black bat.
A huge, red bat.
Or even,
"It's impossible to find this black bat's eyes through it's handsome head fur. It keeps making piercing shrieks at you. Is it talking? I'm getting a headache, I must smash it with my hammer."

Or whatever.

I then want to be able to edit, append to, or replace the description and I want the original description to be available.

So that's the basic idea behind the note processor I'm building. A few people have mentioned Nethack to me. I haven't played this game much because I don't like starting with an animal. It gives me mixed feelings. 8) Anyway, I'm planning a raid on nethack source files tonight.

The note processor is the focal point of my 7drl. I'm creating a low-level branch from D1 to the Ecumenical Temple as a minigame to test the note processor. Hopefully, I'll complete the noteprocessor first, then use it to help make the branch. My point here, is that a lot of my 7drl may end up being a lot of description input into crawl.

As others have written, I am taking on this project for personal reasons: my fun, tools I'd like to use, to gain some programming experience. Hopefully I'll make something others can use.

Thanks for reading,
Christopher Evenstar