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Re:Writing web-based interactive fiction with Ink by WorldMaker on Thursday April 29, 2021 @09:20PM (#26988881)
Relatedly a lot of other similar complexity management tools from "writing code" have direct or indirect equivalents in writing complex branching narratives. Things like "integration testing" ("if I run this script of choices, do I get a world state that I expect?") and "fuzz testing" ("can the user find weird input combinations that break the world state?").

You can graph dependency graphs and state machine graphs to try to look for bad patterns or unwinnable cases visually.

In one interesting extreme example Andrew Plotkin put a ton of work into building python tools to build the puzzle dependency graph of Hadean Lands to hard prove them (in the style of mathematical proofs) and make sure they didn't contain unaccounted for unwinnable states. Plotkin blogged a lot about that during the development of Hadean Lands.

Re:Writing web-based interactive fiction with Ink by anthk on Friday April 30, 2021 @01:56AM (#26990211)
If I was Plotkin I'd use prolog for that :), that's just a graph node-dependency check.
Re:Writing web-based interactive fiction with Ink by WorldMaker on Friday April 30, 2021 @11:58AM (#26995151)
I assume it was a combo of familiarity and also related to whichever mechanisms Zarf was extracting world states graphs from Inform 7 and/or Z-Machines. (I haven't read the blog posts in a while, and obviously Zarf's blog is blocked on this work laptop because technical discussions about games can't possibly~ have technical insight into work.)