suggestions for transcripts

When you're making a transcript for club wooby, what you're really doing is playing the game for an audience. And the audience is my dad. And he only knows the basics of how text adventures work.

For example, I don't think he knows that “>I” is short for “>TAKE INVENTORY.” So it'd be helpful if your transcript used the long forms of commands.

Obviously your transcript should cover the whole game, without skipping any steps. You don't want to dial in the combination to a safe or whatever before we see your character learning what the combination is. You want to hit all the critical story beats.

“The whole game” doesn't mean “all printable text,” and you probably don't want to examine every single fence and tree and drainpipe. But one of the goals of this exercise is to impress my dad, so you're encouraged to include any clever details you can think of. And, complementarily, if you know about any parts of a game that are broken or stupid, you should feel free to avoid including them in your transcript.

Typically an IF interpreter's transcript function outputs a plain old txt file. This doesn't preserve text styling, and it doesn't play nice with special characters—like the em dashes that I love to overuse. If you really want to impress my dad/me, you can submit your transcript as a PDF with all the original text styling. (I've done this by copy/pasting chunk after chunk of a game from a browser interpreter into a word processor. It's really tedious.)

I am led to understand that the Windows interpreter filfre and the MacOS interpreter Spatterlight do a good job of preserving formatting inside the interpreter for you to copy/paste into a word processor.