We had A Big Discussion around possibilities for games that explore a katamari-ish idea of growth.

• Themes:
  • Changes in scale affecting what you can interact with in the environment
  • Collecting objects, ending up with a chaos of inventory

There are enough ways to go with this that we may want a couple of teams exploring this with different tools or ideas!

I want to run with this using Inform 7, and there's plenty of room for other teams to play with the ideas in Twine, ink, etc. I like the literal-katamari concept technically, and I like the idea of playing with what it means to "get" something, what counts as getting something "bigger".

Any takers?

this sounds fantastic! since i'm a novice Inform7 user, would you be open to walking me through an example? how would i make it so that i can't pick up a pencil, until i pick up the paperclip first?

(many of our participants might lean on Lesson 7 from I7 boot camp to figure this kind of thing out: https://wiki.illinois.edu/wiki/display/PBD/Inform Tutorials 7: Lists)

Taking your question at face value, you could do something like:

Before taking the pencil:
    if the paperclip is not enclosed by the player:
        say "You can't take the pencil without the paperclip.";
        stop the action.

Although in a katamari-based game, you'd probably want to generalize this with something like:

A thing has a number called size. The size of a thing is usually 1.
The maximum takeable size is a number that varies. The maximum takeable size is 1.
Before taking a thing (called the target):
    if the size of the  target is greater than the maximum takeable size:
        say "[The target] is too big for you to take.";
        stop the action.

That just leaves the question of how to adjust the maximum takeable size after you pick something up. Is it the size of the largest thing you're carrying, plus one? The total size of everything you're carrying? For that matter, do we want to keep it as a variable? It could be less error-prone to make a function that computes it afresh every time it's needed:

To decide what number is the maximum takeable size: