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Start of Chapter 24: Testing and Debugging |
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Back to §24.4. Low-level debugging commands |
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Onward to §24.6. Testing for thoroughness |
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§24.5. Adding new testing verbs and Release for Testing
As we saw in Chapter 2, we can mark some of our source text so that it will not be included in a finished story. This means that we can add special testing commands available to the author but not available to our eventual players. This is a good way to add our own suite of testing verbs to a story beyond the "Test me with..." features already described.
Here are some types of testing verbs that can be useful to add:
Chapter jumps. We might create test commands that took us to a later stage of the story (perhaps doing more setup than "Test me..." alone can handle).
Status information. We might create a test command that would show us status information beyond what's covered in the Standard Rules. For instance, if we had a story that heavily modeled the moods of other characters and we wanted to be able to check those moods at any time, we might add a SHOWMOOD command that would tell us about a character's emotional state.
Puzzle satisfaction lists. Some simulation-rich stories offer puzzles that can be solved in a variety of ways: for instance, a sealed glass box that can be smashed with any object that has been marked with the properties "hard" and "heavy". Later, we might want to be able to check which in-story objects would work as a solution to this puzzle, so we might create a command like
Listing hammers is an action out of world applying to nothing.
Carry out listing hammers:
say "These things can break the glass: [line break]";
repeat with item running through portable hard heavy things:
say "[item][line break]";
so that we can review that there are enough objects available and that the list doesn't include anything it shouldn't. In a small story this kind of thing is pretty easy to keep track of in the author's head. Large stories can contain thousands of objects, however, at which point it becomes valuable to have an automated method of verification.
Just occasionally, we might also want to build a version of a story that will allow beta-testers access to the debugging commands. This is especially relevant for long stories: if we're testing a story with a lot of playtime and the testers have already thoroughly reviewed the first portion of the story, we might want to let them have access to testing commands that fast-forward to later sections.
To do this, we can use the "Release for Testing" feature. Release for testing builds a version of the story that does include testing commands and any sections labeled "Not for release".