Counterfeit Monkey — 66 of 292

Chapter 3 - Useful Items

Section 1 - Holdall

[For most of the time this game was in development, it used the backpack as a holdall and juggled the player's belongings in and out of it. Which worked fine, but it caused occasional irritations when one of the NPCs needed to give the player something, thereby exceeding his carrying capacity.

But more than that, it started to feel like all this obsession about how you were carrying what was just not very interesting: not fun, not related to the main substance of the puzzles, and just distracting from the main text of the game. I removed most of the puzzles that had to do with inventory management, toned down the one that remained (dealing with the Authenticator), revised the inventory listing to de-emphasize containment, and got rid of the carrying capacity constraint.

So, yeah, it's not remotely realistic that we can carry around all the stuff we carry in the game -- but it wouldn't be realistic stuffed into a backpack *either*. And not worrying about this gets the game *out of the way* of a lot of the core puzzle interactions, which are what the player should be focused on instead.]

[Include Considerate Holdall by Jon Ingold.

When play begins:

now every long thing is unstashable;

now the iron-pans are unstashable;

now every fluid thing is unstashable.

The carrying capacity of the player is 10. ]

[And now for the cases where the player explicitly tries to stash something inappropriate, e.g. with PUT ALE IN BACKPACK: ]

Instead of inserting a long thing into the backpack:

say "[The noun] [one of]couldn't possibly fit[or]would be much too long[or]would just stick out[at random]."

Instead of inserting a fluid thing into the backpack:

say "[The noun] [one of]would make a real mess[or]would just spill[at random]."

Instead of inserting the pans into the backpack:

say "There's nowhere near enough room."