Synopsis
What a bore to be alone at the Opera...
You are Armand Duval, a young bourgeois, looking for the love of a special woman. What a coincidence she sits opposite of you at the Opera tonight.
About...
The Lady with the Camellias is a tiny parser prototype, originally created for the Neo-Twiny Jam, adapting a scene from the titular book by Alexandre Dumas, fils. This was my first (serious) attempt at Inform7.
The setting of this story is very obvious to those who've read La Dame aux Camelias, as it is the scene of the very first meeting between Duval and Ms Gautier at the Opera (the start of their affair). That scene was so playful when I read it, especially with Ms Gautier's little caprices, that the idea of turning it into a mini-parser flowed so naturally.
With this prototype, I got to chip away at the Inform engine, learning how to code in natural language the basics of parsers (blocks on path, objects, actions), as well as more intermediate elements (diverging paths, conditional statements). I'm still not very confident with this format, but I know that it can do so much that it would do a proper adaptation justice.
Because of the word limit, most of what I had in mind for the game didn't come to fruition - but you can find my vision within the notes and comments left in the source code. I've called this prototype a hubris project, thinking I could adapt a long chapter into a itsy bitsy parser.
Maybe one day, I'll work on a complete version?