Making little toys

My day job has long since transitioned away from being about hands on programming, but I still like to tinker with writing code and building things. Nothing on my site will ever be Ai generated as a matter of principle by the way.

Since I don't get to scratch the coding itch at work much (outside of writing SQL queries for occassional reporting needs) I have been trying to find little things to mess around with in afternoons and weekends when I'm not busy with something else. I tend to bite off more than I should for these projects and they're all unlikely to ever really be "finished".

My most recent project that will never be finished is called Advise. It's available on this website (and is very unfinished at the time of publishing this).

It's an interactive fiction/text adventure language/interpretter inspired by Inform. Well, actually, it's inspired by an IRC chatbot from an old channel I used to be an op for. We had a bot that could read a pastebin file that used something like Inform and play a little text adventure in the channel. We'd share the pastebin link and add new rooms and items and in-jokes. It was a fun time.

My goal with Advise is to do something similar. Have one part of the page be the interactive fiction and the other side be a text input where you can tweak the program and play around. I'm borrowing the naturallistic language idea from Inform and plan on implementing some subset of what you'd expect from an actual system.

At the moment it is very bare-bones. In fact, the current version doesn't handle having more than one room because I've gotten sidetracked with other things. But the bones are there.

I'll come back to it and improve on it over the next weeks or months, I hope.