PyramidIF

ChoiceScript is a very easy language to write in. It is how all Choice of Games narratives are created. It is simple, powerful, and lets an author do more writing than coding to create an extensive choice narrative that can hinge on the powerful accumulation of stats that bend and alter the story and an individual player's game experience. Right now, CoG publication is probably one of the most accessible and visible ways for choice-IF authors to actually get a game out to the public and get paid for it. Choice of Games commissions talented authors for their featured stories that fit within their specific inclusive "house style" framework they are known for and their audience expects, but anyone can submit an "indie" spec game to be hosted by CoG as long as it complies with a certain number of minimally sensible parameters with regard to length and content. That said, writing a CS narrative that fans will want to play and shell out a few dollars for is an e...

Someone on the forums with the handle "lister" decided to industriously tag all the IFComp games on IFDB, so of course, I vainly searched to see where mine had placed over time. Finally on about page seven of hundreds of games, Transparent showed up. I gave it a play-through since I hadn't looked at it in a while, amazed at how packed with stuff it is. Who knows how I got it done; it was way too large for IFComp, and despite starting out moderately-scoped in my head, it blew up out of proportion and I didn't have time to test it as thoroughly as one would want. As I explored Thorne Manor again, enjoying how well the random sound generation actually worked out, I couldn't remember what clever refusal message I had implemented if someone tries to pick up the bathtub: >TAKE TUB Taken. Dammit. With all the poorly-conceived inventory limits I had initially put in that game, my photographer was now walking around a haunted house carrying an entire claw-foot ...

I wrote last week about getting over the fear of rulebooks in Inform 7, specifically by not using the all-powerful INSTEAD to accomplish everything.  After I read over the post, I remembered one of my specific hangups using rulebooks occurred because I was over-thinking the process: how does Inform know how my additional rules work in order?  How does Inform know what order the rules should go in? Don't I need to write them very specifically so Inform and the compiler don't get confused? The short answer is not really.  Beyond a few minor sequencing points when polishing the text output, Inform does not care where in the source text we write our rules. And the rulebooks consider every rule in them unless a rule explicitly tells it to stop (with an INSTEAD or "stop the action.") Imagine creating a shopping list. Unless we're extremely familiar with the grocery store layout, we'll write a list as items occur to us, possibly over a period of time or several ...

Inform 7 allows an author to accomplish things in many different ways.  It's easy enough to make a dungeon full of rooms and doors and containers and treasures, but if we go much further beyond that, we have to work with creating rules. All actions in Inform have rulebooks which roughly correspond to phases of time it takes to perform the action.  The major three are CHECK - This is where Inform decides if an action can be accomplished. CARRY OUT - This is where the actual mechanics of the action take place. REPORT - After everything is done, this is where the parser can print a message confirming what has taken place. Three other rulebooks are built-in: BEFORE AFTER  INSTEAD BEFORE and AFTER slot where you'd expect, but INSTEAD is probably the most powerful and most mis-used due to that inherent power.  New authors often find the check/carry out/report sequence confusing at first, and will latch onto INSTEAD like Dr. Who's sonic screwdriver to ...

I had posted a bit on IFDB about this, but I had to pull FINAL GIRL out of public view.  I was working with a player who was having terrible technical issues.  I'd had one or two of these types of things over the years, and most often a player had made a bizarre sequence of moves and fallen through the world, or Storynexus' servers had hiccuped.  Usually resetting the player's game would fix everything.  In this case, it did not.

I can't believe I don't hear about people who use Inform 7 also using  Trizbort .  The name sounds like a Zorkian spell word, and it might as well be one for how awesome it is functionally.  It's PC only, which is one reason it took me so long to try it.  It's billed as an interactive fiction mapper, and it can produce a map based on a transcript of a game that is fed to it.  It can actually do this live if the interpreter produces the transcript on the fly during play.   I haven't actually used it like this though. What I do use it for is to lay out the general geography of my Inform projects.  Trizbort amazingly also works backwards .  I don't think this is a top-tier bullet point of the program but it should be:  An author can easily drag and drop a map in Trizbort and then have it spit out an Inform or TADS project or text to paste into one that does all the room creation and connections automatically.