add day4

7drl-2021-day4.gmi

@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+# 7DRL 2021 Day 4
+
+=> . ..
+=> 7drl-2021.gmi 7DRL 2021
+
+## Day 4 - You are carrying
+
+Did not get as much work in on this today as I would have liked. So it goes. I spent most of the day prepping for teaching and working on my podcast, which I'm as excited about, so it's okay. So I put maybe only an hour and a half or two into coding today.
+
+I was confused why my grids were still not lined up properly in the Terminal. River Smith on Mastodon pointed out that to get consisted full-width characters I could use east asian full-width latin characters, something I wasn't previously familiar with. These are unicode characters (there are so many!) that appear like western latin characters with extra spacing around them, so they will fit in a grid properly with the emojis I think, and my early testing bears this out. I replaced my @ with ＠. Can you tell?
+
+```
+@ or ＠
+```
+
+Then I went back to looking at emojis for spawning items, and it dawned on me how limiting that is. The brilliance of ascii roguelikes is partly what's so brilliant about reading books for pleasure. Our mind fills in a picture-idea of the environment. I don't fully know how it works, and it's not the same as a visual experience, but I *feel* things that I read, even those that are described. This is why we can almost jump out of our chair when playing rogue and a certain monster appears. I enjoy Brogue but usually can't get past level 10 or 11. I get so thrown off when a purple g appears, and I know it's a goblin conjurer! The emojis are a bit different. They are a representation that's more 1-to-1 with what they symbolize. A tree for example. It's hard to let them to serve as mere symbols rather than the specific object they're depicting perhaps. I'll have to spend more time considering this. I could have particular emoji represent certain types of items. In any case, currently I am spawn emoji terrain and player (or @) and chars as item symbols. It's a strange combo and I've not seen that before. We'll see if it sticks or I move one way or the other or switch to a tileset.
+
+I'm also feeling like I might simplify the mechanics. A small 'tiny village' is spawned each day, and a new one isn't spawned until the next day, replacing the previous. That shouldn't be too bad to do, and perhaps feels not only in scope but also an appropriate amount of gameplay. Less than a coffeebreak, more like an espresso-break. Which is in keeping with the feel I'm going for here. An ambient mini village walking sim that you return to each day, easily, from the command line. But the inventory should be carried over, and perhaps a quest or other things? Maybe just inventory for simplicity at this point. And you collect the items just like the "You are carrying bot" by Andrew Vestal. You can't do anything with them beyond enjoying them. You can drop items and leave behind, or hold onto things you like and read them. Maybe there's a limited size backpack or something, so you have to choose each day what items to keep and what to drop.
+
+[You are Carrying bot on twitter](https://twitter.com/YouAreCarrying/)
+
+Now that I have a particular goal in mind I need to collect a good number of interesting items to be spawned. I read that You are Carrying bot uses a list of items from Infocom classic games like the Zork series, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Planetfall. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find those lists of items readily. It's probably obscured in the source code, but I don't see it in my initial searching.
+
+So next I am checking Darius Kazemi's corpora for ideas.
+
+=> https://github.com/dariusk/corpora/blob/master/data/objects/objects.json There are 450 objects in this file
+
+=> https://github.com/dariusk/corpora/blob/master/data/technology/new_technologies.json words relating to new technologies
+
+=> https://github.com/dariusk/corpora/blob/master/data/technology/appliances.json a list of appliances
+
+=>https://github.com/dariusk/corpora/blob/master/data/words/nouns.json a list of 1000 nouns, though many are ideas rather than objects
+
+=> https://www.survivaltechshop.com/camping-checklist/ An article with 151 items to bring camping
+
+=> https://thesurvivaljournal.com/survival-kit-list/ List of 181 survival kit items
+
+Maybe these last few can be added to Darius's Corpora. They seem in particular a good fit for the outdoor environment setting, though I do like wacky items generation as well.
+
+I think it would be nice to also add messages in a bottle you find and/or books or poetry. 
+
+I'll try to get at the items from Zork and maybe examine the items from robotfindskitten if possible. Perhaps I'll also use a form of Kate Compton's Tracery to develop a grammar. Not sure yet. Depends how ambitious I feel and my time available.
+

7drl-2021.gmi

@@ -6,6 +6,7 @@
 
 Every year is a weeklong 7drl (seven day roguelike challenge), to create a Roguelike videogame in 7 days. This is the first year I'm making something for it. I will hopefully post daily logs here.
 
+=> 7drl-2021-day4.gmi - You are carrying
 => 7drl-2021-day3.gmi - Limits and Zen Simulation
 => 7drl-2021-day2.gmi - Creating Terrain
 => 7drl-2021-day1.gmi - Building a basic engine (creating, saving, loading)