An aid for those that need a hand in starting stories
Dave Walsh
June 1992
Introduction:
This is a program based on the popular game of "Consequences" where you create a scene by adding information randomly about certain aspects of a situation eg:
Man's name (fold paper over and pass it on to next person)
met
Woman's name (fold paper over and pass it on to next person)
at
Place (fold paper over and pass it on to next person)
He said
<what he said> (fold paper over and pass it on to next person)
she replied
<what she said> (fold paper over and pass it on to next person)
and the consequence was
<consequence>
If you've never played, try it at a party!
This program simply takes a selection of phrases and puts them together in a random order. Sometimes it may fire a pupil's imagination, sometimes not!. The phrases that make up the sentence are:
Person Place Doing Time
You can make your own new files of people and places or alter mine. A good first step is to try the program and get the hang of what it is doing!
Starting Off:
Load up the program by double clicking on !system then !HelixSys and finally !Starter (This sounds like a lot of clicking but is only necessary to make sure that the system is from this disc and that the Helix basic public domain module is loaded before using any of the helix basic programs. At this point you will need to wait as the program loads up and places its symbol on the icon bar. From here click on the starter icon to use the program.
From here you are given your first "story start" and the option of:
More Changing it to another
Use Opens up a save box for future use of the story
(at present you can't drop this directly into your word processor but
need to save the idea on disc)
Help Ideas about the story
(If you like the ideas and feel they might help you can save them by clicking the middle button over the help page)
End Let someone else have a go!
The Icon Menu:
This gives you a few other options, namely...
Info
Hints
See - people
- places
- actions
- times
- add more
Words
Quit
The option to add more phrases is through !Edit (a program provided on your applications disc) or any other word processor that will save a list in text form (ASCII).
A few rules exist when you do use !Edit to make another file (or to change the one provided). These are :
1. There must be at least two phrases in each category
2. The file should end with a line feed
3. Each category must finish with the word "end" on a separate line eg:
in a balloon < last place phrase
end
at one o'clock in the morning <first time phrase
4. You may only have up to thirty phrases in each category. A good way of checking how many more there are to fill is by "seeing" the list through the program.
Words:
Is a helpful little routine that opens a directory viewer on the directory where words are to be stored.
Loading another set of words:
Select the word choices option from the icon menu (click the middle button over the !starter icon on the icon bar) and then drag the file of your choice onto the !starter icon.
[A note about "dragging" here- To drag a file you click with the left hand button and hold the button down. If you now move the mouse the file selected will be represented by an orange outline box. As long as you hold down the button you will be able to move the file onto the quiz icon. Once its there ,let go and the file will be "accepted" by the program. This is common across all RISC OS applications and is known as "dragging"]
You now have your set of words in the program.
And finally:
I'm not sure whether Helix basic suffers every now and then with its interface to RISC OS and gets an abort on data transfer message. Certainly if you try and zoom through the options an error can sometimes occur.Its either a limitation of my programming ( a probable cause) or the interface. Either way its a rare occurrence but it has been seen.
If you make a terrific application suitable for distribution as an example on the disc, let me have a copy and I'll send you an update of the program!
Dave Walsh
Advisory Teacher for IT
Clover House
East Kent Education Office
John Wilson Business Park
Thanet Way
Whitstable
This program is public domain. It was written to support schools in the East Kent Archimedes User group but the copyright to the program/code and views outlined in the documentation are mine. The documentation and program should not be separated off the disc before distribution. The program is "as is" and, although I would be interested to hear of ideas for future update and current bugs there can be no commitment of support of the product.
