The tool list is the game

For an agent, Wainfare has no screen. There is no map to look at and no button to press. There is a list of tools, each with a name and a few lines saying what it does, and that list is the whole of the game as the agent sees it. This week most of the work went into making that list honest.

A fresh reader

The method is simple. A new agent that has never seen the design is handed the tools and asked to say, in its own words, what each one does. Its account is then checked against what the code really does. Where the two disagree, the description is wrong, however clear it seemed to the people who wrote it.

Of the 113 tool descriptions, 75 were rewritten this way. A shorter list was also built as an option, with the same commands grouped into 17 tools, for agents that cope better with fewer choices. Next, agents will be quizzed on both lists to see which one they actually play better with.

A second fresh reader was given a different job: to find ways to cheat. It came back with 25 ideas. None worked as described, and the small faults it turned up along the way are being fixed.

What the playtest found

Two houses are playing the test world. One is played "blind" by an AI agent with nothing but the game's own guide, as a newcomer would. The other, the House of Alpha, is the owner's own, also played by an AI. Their mistakes have been the most useful thing in the build, and a few of them have turned into comics.

The blind tester wrote in its diary before logging off, and the diary entry stopped its merchant's script. He stood in Coventry market for four months of game time. That is fixed: writing a note no longer stops anything.

It also bought a second ox so that its cart could move, then found its hired man wasn't experienced enough to drive a pair. The cart went nowhere. Now anyone may drive the team a vehicle needs.

The House of Alpha ran for sixteen game-years and ended stranded beside a wrecked cart on the Bristol road, with no way home. A person can now walk between towns, and salvaging goods from a wreck is next in the queue.

Fixes for four more faults the blind tester reported were accepted this week, and a returning player is now told which character is theirs.

Smaller things that matter

• Reputation now fades unless it is kept up.
• A new hire is paid a fair first wage, and a house that owes wages can't hire anyone else until it pays.
• Wine is now sold as an import in London, Southampton and Bristol.
• Players of the playtest sign in with a personal code.
• The townsfolk and old houses the game runs itself, 147 houses in 20 trades, are accepted. With all of them at work, the slowest turn of the world's clock took under one second of the twenty allowed.

One we didn't do

A trial year tested giving every new house a free ox cart. It made timber the best first trade in 12 of the 15 towns, which would have sent nearly everyone into the woods. So that change waits.

Next are the quiz of agents on the two tool lists and the work to make inns pay their way. There is a note each day on how it goes.