Quick start guide

Introduction

The concept of TACk is that you design a series of "scenes." Each scene has a set of events (currently "Entering scene" and "Command entered.")

To control the flow of the game, you have actions, conditions and action blocks (a combination of a set of actions, action blocks and conditions) at your disposal.

The game also stores flags, or a state, that lets it "remember" what the player has done so that different things may happen depending on what has already happened.

This is the initial state of the designer:

States

You are able to set states to on or off using actions, as well as check whether they are on or off using conditions. States are shared across scenes, meaning that if you set state "Has Torch" to be on in one scene, it can be checked later in another scene.

Action block

An action block may contain actions and other action blocks. It may also have a list of conditions that have to be met for its contents to be executed.

Initially, each event has one action block. The game engine will traverse the contents of the action block from top to bottom when an event is triggered. All the conditions of an action block must be met for its contents to be executed, otherwise its else-block (if any) will be run, followed by any actions/action blocks that come after it.

To modify an action block, left-click the round icon in the top-left of it. This will open a menu where you can add conditions to it as well as actions and action blocks.

Else-block

An action block can have an else-block added to it. The else-block will be executed if any of the conditions of the action block are not met.

Action

There are several actions that can be added to an action block. The ones that exist so far are pretty straight-forward and are described by their names.

To bring up a menu for an action, left-click its title (the green bar.)

Condition

An action block can have any number of conditions on it. Note that conditions that make the action block impossible to execute are not detected by the game engine, so you will have to look through your conditions if an action block isn't being executed when it should.

A condition may be negated, which means it'll count as being met if it's not met, and vice versa. So a negated "Event argument is 'go north'" should really be read as "Event argument is not 'go north'."

To bring up the menu for a condition where you can negate it and remove it, left-click it.

Event argument is...

The "Event argument is" condition is specific for each event. The only event that has an argument right now is the "Command entered" event, where the command that was entered is the argument. So you would use the "Event argument is" condition with a value of, say, "go north" to check if the player wants to go north.

Important note: The event argument for the "Command entered" event is automatically converted to lower case. Also, synonyms for generic actions are replaced with a single word to simplify the process of checking user input. Here's a table of which words get replaced:

The sidebar

The sidebar lets you get an overview of the game as well as change its properties and the properties of the scenes.

Explorer

The explorer is a list of all the scenes in the game. The first item in the list is the game itself. Left-clicking an item in list will show its properties in the "Properties" pane. Double-clicking a scene will change the designer to that scene. Clicking New scene will create a new scene and add it to the game.

Clicking Save will save the game to the server. Saving the game might take a few seconds, and once done, the address bar of your browser will be updated to point to your newly saved game. Going to the URL will let you continue working on the game you saved. Note that it is not possible to overwrite a game, so every time you save, you'll be saving a new copy. This lets you go back to older versions and also lets other people continue your game without being able to ruin it for you.

Properties

The properties pane is context-sensitive and will change based on what you have selected in the explorer list. If a scene is selected you will be able to click Edit scene to go to that scene in the designer (same as double-clicking it in the explorer list) and clicking Delete scene will bring up a confirmation dialog asking you to confirm its deletion (unless it is the starting scene in which case you are not allowed to delete it.)

The properties pane contains a set of editable fields for the currently selected item. Once you've updated a field, you can press Enter in most browsers to save it. Otherwise, just click somewhere outside the field to save it.

Debug

The debug pane lets you try your game as you're working on it. Enter "help" in the input field and hit Enter to get a list of available commands.