Containment contains a lot of text parsing with a very limited Natural Language Understanding system which it turn leads to a problem - localisation. Because the parser is looking for english it obeys the rules of english which means it is very unlikely that the game can ever be localised to any other language since the parser would have to be coded to match that language. It’s for this very reason that I struggled long and hard over the parser concept since including it is essential for the core of the game but it does mean that only english speaking people can play the game. I had thought about using a made-up symbolic based language instead but decided that it would present too much of a learning curve to begin with and would probably put many people off.

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I have been working for a while on a game concept called ‘Containment’ but got side-tracked into writing small flash games that while were fun didn’t really lead anywhere useful. I may still continue to do them in the future but for now I need to concentrate on Containment otherwise it will never get finished. At the same time I finally found a blog style that I like (it’s the one that Cliffski found for his blog) and over time I will modify it to suit my purposes since it’s a little too white for me at the moment - but I love the clean style it presents. 

To get things started here is an image of the test app for Containment that I created over a year ago and sparked off the game as it is now:

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