PyramidIF

Spring is here! Warm sun! Flowering trees! Green grass and--I just went out to move my car and there are snow flurries . I know other regions are getting actual piling snow still, so while it might not feel like a Spring Thing , a new crop of games is here! I often get wrapped up creating my own IF bidness and don't play new releases as much as I should, but since we can't really mow and plant yet, let's take shelter in the gazebo where a bumper crop of 20 entries  are festivalling. I don't guarantee I will be able to chip the frost off of all of these hopeful, budding shrubs, but here's a first foray into what will hopefully soon yield thriving IF greenery: Best Gopher Ever , Arthur DiBianca (Parser Inform/Z) - I had to resist adding an exclamation point at the end of this title. "Help the unfortunate residents of Fairview! (Who are all animals, by the way.)" This is billed as a light puzzle game for all ages and delivers on that. DiBianca has a knack...

I was exceedingly thrilled for my IFComp entry Fair to place 7th this year (woo! top 10!). I have finally written a postmortem which is posted on my blog. Since it's exceedingly long and spoilery, I chose not to push the entirety of it to Planet IF. You can read it here . Please leave comments if there are any other questions you have or elements of the game you'd like to hear about in more detail. Thanks to everyone who played the game and voted!

After last year's Comp, and writing two ambitious games that nobody saw the back half of, I swore that I'd design my next game so that everyone would get to the ending. I'd build it slick like a water slide so people couldn't get stuck if they tried. My brain came up with "explore a tiny space, then answer a multiple choice question about it." There would be no wrong answer, and no puzzles along the way to hinder the player. The game would make no judgement and the player would be free to interpret the situation however they wanted. I also decided the setting would be much more mundane, not horror, more "indie-film bittersweet" and maybe character-based since I'd based all three previous games on situations and mechanics with little regard for anything else. At first in my initial frustration I had intended to troll the Comp hard in the manner of "This is what you want? Here you go!" I also toyed with satirizing the comp with some sort ...

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 ...

Invisible Parties is a ShuffleComp entry authored by its seemingly-tireless organizer, Sam Kabo Ashwell, who has re-released it, correcting a lot of technical problems of the type that can arise from organizing a comp and implementing a small but complicated game simultaneously.  

I don't think I have any kind of audience, and not like I would pander to them.  I would write a post when I want to write a post and wouldn't feel any need to justify...  Anyway, didn't blog a while. Part of that is normal invasion of Real Life stuff.  After that got settled I got involved writing a ShuffleComp entry.  I've wavered between writing my neglected epic in Twine or Inform.  Inform got an update, so since the planets have aligned, I need to get back in gear.

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.