Posts about the Sharpee IF Typescript IF platform and the Chord language
The Go-Live process took a few days, but we got there. Some housekeeping: This is officially: Sharpee version 5.0.0 Chord Language 3.0.0 Chord Writer (IDE) 1.0.0 The DMG installer is for Apple silicon (M1-M5) only The IDE requires Node 18+ and the
It has been exactly 27 days since I began designing and building the Chord language. In that time Sharpee (now referred to as the platform) has been scrubbed of many of its early cruft because creating Chord repeatedly exposed those seams. There were embarrassing event handlers that never acted and
A follow-up to the previous post about seeding and RNG madness. That work is done, but then I needed to figure out how an author creates tests in the IDE. My first reach was to copy Inform 7, but that doesn't really align with how I see
So you want to build a game building platform. You're cruising along and your test games have the usual randomness that adds a little spice to your games, usually combat scenarios. Then other things get a random kick. Then another. You ignore the orthogonal nature of randomness because
The whole concept of versioning software that is built using GenAI is that things change fast and in large ways. In the before times, large feature additions would be considered, designed, and took a long time to deliver. With the models progression from Opus 4 in December of '25
Over the last two weeks I have aligned Sharpee with a new parser-IF modeling language called Chord. This effort was not to adhere to one side or the other. It was a true alignment where both sides were required to maintain their "way", be elegant, and in
After the first pass at designing Chord, I followed the same step as I did with Sharpee. I worked with Claude to build first an Author's Guide, then documentation for the Standard Library. The first document used Family Zoo as its spine and although we found a few
Now that version 2.2 of Sharpee is shipped with the website and developer manual updated, I took a swing at developing a more author friendly syntax that compiles to Sharpee. I'm calling it Chord. It's currently implemented in a branch and working with Cloak of
Phrase Algebra Fully Implemented Sharpee 2.x replaces the entire text-rendering system. Text is no longer a string with embedded formatters; it's a tree of typed Phrase values that defer realization, rendered by one per-locale Assembler at the end of the turn. The old
There is still one glaring weakness in Sharpee directly related to separating logic from text emission. Sharpee is intentionally a developer-first/author-second platform and I've leaned into that design. I often use the words, "The Sharpee Way," when talking to Claude. As an exercise
If you hate GenAI, you probably want to skip this episode, though I would assume anyone reading my blog should already know what I do. Sharpee has been stable-ish for a few months. I bumped it to 1.0 and started revising the repository documentation. It occurred to me
Update: Even though the packages are working for most aspects of Sharpee, I am going through an alternate regression process and finding more issues. I'm already bumping it to 1.1.0 and likely to hit 1.2 this week. I restructured the Family Zoo tutorial to act
Even though the platform has been stable for a couple of months, it has shown gaps as I work on stories and extended use cases. One of those use cases was inspired by an intfiction.org thread which asked about multi-user play where two or more people could play
Back in January/February in the midst of porting Mainframe Zork (Dungeon) to Sharpee and burning the rough edges off of the platform, Claude did something weird. It inferred a working version of my envisioned Text Service that was not really my vision. But it was weird because it actually
All the latest updates to Sharpee are now in the npm registry. Package Description @sharpee/sharpee Main package — re-exports all platform packages @sharpee/core Core functionality — semantic events, save/restore contracts, random @sharpee/engine Runtime engine — game loop, command execution, turn management @sharpee/world-model World