The Tell Format
Tapestry stories are text files with the .tell extension. Tell files a variant of yaml, consisting of alternating plain text and structured command sections, along with optional comments.
The plain text sections always consist of English-like statements such as The pen is on the desk. The man is carrying the plan called Panama. and so on. Every story must contain at least one room and the player; so this is the simplest possible story ( and the simplest possible .tell file. )
The Lobby is a room. You are in the Lobby.
The structured command sections contain a series of lines consisting of key-value pairs. Such a section might look something like this:
- Say: "Press 'Q' to quit."
- Interpret:with:
- - "quit"
- "q"
- - Action: "request to quit"
Section separators mark the end of one section type, and the start of the next. They are three dashes on their own line:
---
Both the plain text and the command sections can contain comments ( ie. notes to yourself or other authors which don’t affect the actual story. ) Comments start with hash, followed by a space, and run until the end of the line.
# This is a comment.
Comments can only outside of quoted text.
- Say: "Hello world." # This is a comment
- Say: "This does not # contain a comment."
Generally speaking, plain text describes the world, and commands control how play proceeds. While anything that can be described in plain text can be described using commands, it’s often much more work to use commands for world descriptions. At the same time, the commands are the only syntax available for implementing game rules. So commands can do more, even if they sometimes take longer to write.
This example says the same thing using both methods:
The Lobby is a room. You are in the Lobby.
---
- Define nouns:as:
- "lobby"
- "room"
- Relate:to:via:
- "self"
- "lobby"
- "whereabouts"