Gauges and counters

While you read, a story can track values that move: your courage, your gold, the number of clues found. These are counters. The author can choose to show some of them as a gauge, at the top of the screen.

Two gauges: Courage as a bar, Clues as a ratio.

A gauge takes the shape the author picked:

• a bar that fills up,
• a ratio, like 1/3,
• a percent,
• a plain number,
• pips, in a fixed number, which fill up in proportion,
• or a clock, which starts from a given time and counts the minutes gone by.

Your gauges rise and fall as you choose. The figure animates on every change, to catch your eye. A bar gauge carries no figure, its fill level is what tells you where you stand. The author can also replace a gauge’s name with an icon, to save room.

Tip

Keep an eye on your gauges. A story can save certain paths for whoever has enough courage, or enough gold.

When there are too many for the bar

A story can define as many gauges as it wants. The bar, though, takes the measure of the room available and stops where it has to: up to six on a wide screen, two on a phone. It does not cut at a fixed number, because a gauge named “Reputation” and a plain “42” do not take the same width.

The ones that do not fit are not lost: the Status tab of your sheet holds all of them. See The inventory and items. And as soon as room frees up, by turning your phone for instance, the bar takes them back.

Note

That tab only shows your gauges. The Statistics entry of the menu sums up your whole game: sequences discovered, items collected, achievements unlocked, undos and play time.

The count of sequences discovered is measured against the total of those that really show up. A story often holds others, purely technical, that route the reading without ever appearing on screen. They are not counted, so reading everything does take you to the maximum.