Heartstone Update 1.6.0: The Infrastructure Update

Mar 1, 2026

Hello, everyone! I have been hard at work on this project and I thought now would be a good time to push this update.

Players can now venture past the Lizardfolk swamps and through a mountain pass, where they are met with the last leg of their journey into the city of Gort.

However, the main course of this update is in simply how many engine and parser changes are present. I think the best way to showcase this is to list everything out change-log style. I will also talk shop about the project as has been standard in these update posts, so read till the end for all the info!

New Commands

• OOPS <word>: Made a typo in your last sentence? Just type OOPS followed by the correction, and the game will instantly fix and execute your last command!
• AGAIN (or G): Repeats your very last command without you having to retype it.
• WAIT (or Z): Passes the time. If you do this in combat, it skips your turn, letting enemies act and allowing status effects to tick down.
• TAKE ALL EXCEPT / DROP ALL BUT: Better inventory management is here! You can now type things like DROP ALL BUT KEY or TAKE EVERYTHING EXCEPT SWORD. (Dropping all will prompt you to confirm so you don't lose your loot by accident, and it smartly ignores your equipped items).
• EMPTY / DUMP: Quickly dump the entire contents of a container onto the ground or into another container.
• CLOSE / SHUT: You can now close things you’ve opened, still somewhat a WIP but this opens the door for some fun trap-related puzzles in the future.
• SCORE: Check your progress at any time to see your level, XP, gold, rooms explored, and enemies defeated.
• VERBOSE / BRIEF / SUPERBRIEF: Customize how much text you see when walking into a room. Note: The default setting is VERBOSE so players don't miss any details!

Parser Features

• Look Under, In, and Behind: You can now search specific parts of objects and furniture using spatial prepositions. Try LOOK UNDER BED or SEARCH BEHIND WARDROBE.
• Implicit Auto-Take: If you try to USE, EQUIP, GIVE, or PLACE an item that is sitting on the ground, your character will now automatically pick it up first (e.g., "first taking the sword") instead of forcing you to type out the GET command.
• In-Place Usage: You no longer need to pick everything up to use it. You can now read a book while it's resting on an altar, or use healing herbs right off the ground to restore health!
• Smarter "Can't Use" Messages: If you try to use something incorrectly, the game gives you context based on whether the item is a quest item, treasure, or miscellaneous junk.
• "Did you mean?" Typo Correction: The game now uses smart fuzzy-matching. If you accidentally misspell an item, NPC, or verb, the game will try to figure out what you meant instead of throwing an error.
• Pronouns: You can finally use words like IT, HIM, HER, and THEM. For example, you can EXAMINE COINS and then simply type TAKE THEM, or TAKE ALL FROM IT when looking at a chest. (Or “Examine Guard Lena” and then “Talk to her.”)
• Smarter "And" Commands: The game is much better at understanding sentences with "and." Commands like TAKE SWORD AND SHIELD work perfectly, and it’s smart enough to know that a BOW AND ARROW is a single item, keeping it intact.
• Better Questions: If you type an incomplete command like LOOK UNDER, the game will now contextually ask you "Look under what?" instead of a generic error.
• Natural Language Tweaks: You can safely use (or ignore) words like "the", "a", or "an" across all commands. I also fixed an issue where typing short words (like "fire") would accidentally trigger longer spells (like "fireball").

Other Changes

• Backpack Limits: Your character now has a strict inventory capacity (default is 20 items). This is fully enforced in-game and visible in your UI backpack view!
• Location Sidebar: I’ve removed the Location sidebar widget to declutter the screen, as it was redundant info.
• Bug Fixes: Taking multiple items at once will now correctly remove all of them from the frontend display. Typing a long string of commands won't cause the game to bug out if one of those commands triggers a cutscene or starts combat. And I fixed some behind-the-scenes math bugs relating to HP/MP when equipping and unequipping gear.

There is more engine work being pushed than content with this update, but I hope this will make the game smoother in all areas and make it a little less frustrating. This leads to my talking point about the project--

The Mid-Life Crisis of the Project

(I just coined a new term: Reflecting on a project in the middle of development is not a post-mortem for obvious reasons, so I say it’s called a ‘mid-life crisis.’ Ahh, I think I’m funny.)

As I keep going on with development of this game, I realize that the rooms, NPCs, and dialogue are built around the assumption that interaction is mostly narrative. That’s why I do think ‘an interactive fantasy novel’ is a good descriptor.

But still, I know there are things in this game that break traditional IF parser standards.

Admittedly, when I first started this project the only parser games I had played were Zork I and some of II. And when building Oakhaven, my goal was more so “let’s give this area a larger world with a story that you can uncover by interacting with it.”

In this project, you move through spaces, receive story through room prose and sequential NPC conversations, pick things up to build a character, and fight how you wish.

And that's a coherent design-- but it's closer to a visual novel with movement and combat than it is to Zork’s parser based puzzle sandbox. That's not a failure from my initial goal of this project, it's just what this project is.

But as I get further along in development and play other IF games, I want to add more interactivity beyond narrative and worldbuilding. I look at what the genre expects and feel some regret that this project doesn’t take advantage of them.

I have some fun escape room type puzzles that need things like “turn the valve” or “set the clock forward.” But, ya know, Heartstone Caverns wasn’t built for that.

So I think retrofitting classic IF conventions onto this project would be a mismatch, not an improvement. Adding TWIST/SWIM/CLIMB only has value if rooms were designed with rewarding things to do.

Adding verbs that have nothing to respond to just creates a hollow illusion of interactivity. I think you all would notice when "pull (feature/item)" gives the same characterful shrug in every room except for the few late game areas it would be used in. So, for this specific project I think it actually makes the world feel less real and not more.

I realize I could go back into the rooms of this game and define out those features, but the main quest doesn’t utilize these features and the story is almost fully planned out. I don’t believe it would be rewarding for myself or players to try and turn this interactive fantasy novel into an interactive fantasy sandbox.

But furthermore, the NPCs and the sequential dialogue system is a harder problem to grapple with.

It goes against traditional interactive fiction standards and is a design choice I regret at this stage of the game. For a game focused so much on reading dialogue it was a mismatch that I still fight against.

Yet the cost of converting all existing NPCs to a topic-based conversation system isn't engine work like what is listed above. It means rewriting every NPC's dialogue tree from scratch with new branching logic. That's actual content work and the scope of that change is frankly enormous.

For another project, starting with those conventions as first class design constraints changes everything. A sequel to this game could actually use a lot of those standards we don't have right now and it would be more interactive by design.

The engine work is actually not that different and the code I have right now has the potential to serve these interactive features. I don’t believe the engine is ‘in tatters’ or unable to be worked on to make that a reality. The real difference is intentionally designing rooms that reward those verbs from day one.

I feel the smartest move is exactly what I’m planning: finish this game, keep refining the code, learn from it, and build the next installment better. I am going to continue to be open about my creative process and my visions for all of my projects posted on this site.

We have a massive foundation here to work from, and I am optimistic about the future of the world of Valeria, both in written and game form.

As a note, I am expecting Update 1.7 to ship by the end of the month and include the massive dwarven city of Gort along with the main quest story.

Finally, I would like to mention that I have just created a substack. ‘InTheAtticDev Writing’ will be a way for my pieces to be served in more places for better SEO, and also it will allow me to start slowly building up a mailing list and send notifications out when I post new works.

If that interests you I urge you to check it out– and if you are a fellow writer, get in touch with me via info@intheattic.dev. I’m always looking for new things to read and I’d love to bounce ideas off people who have similar writing interests as me.

Alright, this may be the longest announcement post on the site, so I’ll wrap it up here.

As always thank you to all who have played Heartstone Caverns.

Peace and Love to all, (except Big Orange and the other schmucks who are so lame I legit forgot to include their names here on the first go)
– Connor | YodaInTheAttic