Settings

The settings.js file gives the author the opportunity to customise the game to his or her liking.

In fact, there are two files, one in "lib" where the defaults are set, and one in "game" for authors. You just need to include the values you want to change in your own settings.js file.

Settings are all attributes of the settings object, and you can add also your own custom attributes - but be aware that none of these attributes are saved when the player saves their game, so they should not be used to track game state (i.e., in general they should never change during play; the only exception might be player customisation of the interface).

The values in the code snippets below are the defaults, except where noted.

Meta-Data

The first section is a set of constants for meta-data.

settings.title = "A First Step..."
settings.author = "The Pixie"
settings.subtitle = "An example game for Quest 6"
settings.version = "1.0"
settings.thanks = ["Kyle", "Lara"];
settings.warnings = 'No warning relevant for this game.'

Basic info about your game. Note that the first two are required (there is no default), and these are the only setting you must have in "settings.js". The "thanks" setting is an empty array by default; it is shown here with two entries to show how it should be formatted.

The "warnings" setting is useful for players who might have issues with certain games (for example, a description of a lavish meal might upset someone with an eating disorder, and graphics depictions of violence or sex should definitely be mentioned). Players can choose to use the WARNING command to see this information. You may also want to include further warnings that show automatically when your game starts in more extreme cases. I appreciate this is somewhat subjective.

Game play settings

settings.failCountsAsTurn = false
settings.lookCountsAsTurn = false
settings.saveDisabled = false
settings.splitLinesOn = "<br>"
settings.convertNumbersInParser = true
settings.maxUndo = 10
settings.moneyFormat = "$!"

By default Quest 6 does not count it as a turn if the player types something that the parser cannot understand (which is different to when the parser understands but the character cannot do the action). Also by default, Quest 6 also does not consider LOOK to take a turn. The first two allow you to change that.

You also have the option to disable saving.

Quest 5 considers "<br>" in a string to be a line break. Quest 6 does not work quite the same so you can have it use whatever you want.

If you use COUNTABLEs, the player can type GET FIVE BRICKS. The parser convert the word "FIVE" to the digit "5" (and any number from 0 to 20), which the COUNTABLE system can then handle. If "convertNumbersInParser" is set to false, the player will have to type the digits, not the word for the number. However, you may not want that if you have items with numbers in their names (though there are ways around that using the items "regex" attribute). Commands will process faster if this is set to false (say around 20% faster, though on my system they take around 2 ms, so not noticeable anyway).

"maxUndo" is the maximum number of times the player can undo (i.e., by default Quest 6 remembers the last ten turns). Set to zero to disable.

"moneyFormat" is clearly the format for money

There are also various settings connected to specific features, but these are discussed in the pages on about the relevant feature and better read in that context.

File settings

For all these settings, filenames should be given without the path or extension.

settings.lang = "lang-en"      // Set to the language file of your choice
settings.customExits = false      // Set to the filename to use otherwise
settings.libraries = ["saveload", "text", "io", "command", "defaults", "templates", "world", "npc", "parser", "commands"]
settings.customLibraries = []
settings.files = ["code", "data"] // Additional files to load

"lang" allows you to set the language. "customExits" allows you to override the normal "north", "south", set it to the name of the file in your game folder.

"customLibraries" allows you to add custom libraries to your game. A library is a set of files (or just one) that might be used across multiple games, possibly shared with other authors. Each entry in the array should be a dictionary with a "folder" entry, a string, and a "files" entry, an array of filenames.

The "files" array is an array of files specific to your game. By convention, "code.js" has functions, commands and other stuff, while "data.js" has all the objects, but you may want to add other files (I like to have one for NPCs for example).

The User Interface

See here.

Date and time

See here.

setup and intro

These are used when the game starts, if set. "setup" must be a function, and "intro" a string. Note that "intro" is printed first so the player has something to read while "setup" runs.

To see how to create a dialog box at start up for character creation, see here.

Development settings

Useful when writing your game.

Set "playMode" to "dev" or "beta" when developing or beta-testing your game - see here for why!

settings.reportAllSvg = true
settings.test = false

When "reportAllSvg" is true, the draw function will output the raw SVG to the console.

Set "test" to true to allow unit testing (see here).