Blogs

Messiah Quest 1.1

Posted on 21 November 2020

Next month (or possibly sooner) there will be an update for Messiah Quest! I’ve had an idea to improve the text based game for years now, but I’ve finally decided to implement it. Messiah Quest 1.1 will introduce a splash of color!

The original method of informing the player there was a point of interest in the scene was simply writing the name as a “Proper Noun” with capitalized letters. With the new update, these points of interest will now be highlighted and color coded. The highlighted words will help the player quickly understand what is important in the scene as well as hint to which commands to use.

The development of this update shouldn’t be too long. I’ve already implemented a new method of writing to the console which scans the text for codes, and when a code is found, the text color changes accordingly. The next task (and the more tedious one) is inserting the codes into the messages. Since I’m focusing on the functionality of the color coding, as in a point of interest is only highlighted when it exists in the scene rather than every time it is referenced throughout the game, there shouldn’t be a lot of places to insert codes. That’s why I’m naming this the Splash of Color Update. It’s just a little bit of color to give the player hints, so the game will still be a lot of green.