Oooh -- toys...

[jducoeur]

A recent link roundup from jikharra sent me surfing on the subject of Interactive Fiction, aka Text Adventure Games, an old favorite of mine. (And presumably of others here who are old enough to remember when they were cool.) That, in turn, took me to the current page on Inform, one of the IF design tools.

Man, the field has evolved. Inform is a neat enough toy to make me want to build some IF games just to use it. The UI looks really lovely, and they've clearly given a lot of thought to the design process for these games. It no longer expects you to write a huge blort of text and then play through it; instead, it's designed for highly interactive desgining, building your world up gradually. It provides good-looking tools for automated testing of the game and noting where things have changed. And it still outputs Z-Machine, which means it should still play on my phone. (Which, y'know, is just delightfully geeky.)

Hmm. I wonder what I could write? So many options...

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Hunh. They're effectively generating a process map on the fly, reminiscent of case-based reasoning (which goes in and out of favor), but with more detail because it knows more about the structure of the world than a normal CBR system. Interesting.

[kiya]

I dabble in coding in TADS, 'cause the language syntax is near-identical to the one I'm most familiar with, myself. And it's revealed to me that I'm *bad* at the sort of writing that's necessary for writing IF -- I don't have whole plots when I start work, so I wind up just faffing around ....

[bkdelong.livejournal.com]

ah, memories:

West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.