Inform 7 Source Code (released under the “CC BY 4.0” license) Your Office Demo (CandW22 Inform 7 Workshop, Video 1) Journalism Game Scenario (CandW22 Inform 7 Workshop, Video 2) Noir Detective Game Scenario (CandW22 Inform 7 Workshop, Video 3)
I just dusted off a #textadventure project I started in Inform6 around 1999. By around 2007 I had rebuilt about 90% of it in #inform7 and expanded it in fits and starts. But I haven’t touched it in 11 years. It took me about 90 minutes to update all the deprecated code, but it runs!
Inform is a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language, and consists of a core compiler, together with extensions, kits and other resources, a number of outlying tools, and documentation, along with applications presenting the system in a friendly way on MacOS, Windows and Linux. This software had been used extensively since 28…
The latest in Aaron A. Reed’s monumental project” 50 Years of Text Games” focuses on Graham Nelson’s programming language Inform, and in particular his game “Curses.” “You have to get a coin from the temple of zeus to buy the ekmek,” explained one responder. “To do that you need to use the rod of luck.…
My contributions this year are a workshop on #Inform7 and “Fixed It For You: Modding Memes, Maps and Minds”.
I have final grades, an annual report, and a video project for a publisher to finish before I unleash my inner nerd and install the latest Inform7 update. (Inform7 is a free programming language and development environment for writing command-line computer games in the spirit of Zork and Colossal Cave Adventure.) This release is a…
Here is an example of how I teach with Inform 7. jerz.setonhill.edu/blog/2012/11/1… @THATCampPGH #tcpgh13
“Iffy Cloak of Darkness” is based on the “Cloak of Darkness” specification — a very simple pattern, designed to help programmers compare the strengths and weaknesses of various coding environments. “Cloak of Darkness” is not going to win prizes for its prose, imagination or subtlety. Or scope: it can be played to a successful conclusion in five…
Pretty awesome, focused use of Inform 7. (I’m generally content just to let my students explore, trusting through experience that they will learn from testing each other’s games and asking me specific questions realated to the stories they are creating, such as, “So how do I make it so you can’t enter the TARDIS without…
I’ll blog pretty much anything that has to do with Inform 7. Text-based games, or interactive fiction, have continued to evolve since the days of Zork. Many works can be powerful for play in the classroom: Emily Short’s “interactive epistolary” First Draft of the Revolution, Andrew Plotkin’s physics-grounded Dual Transform, Peter Nepstad’s historically grounded 1893: A…
Have I mentioned lately that I have some really awesome students? Here’s a narrated screencast, presenting a progress report on a term project that involves programming in Inform 7 to create a text-adventure game designed to teach student journalists how to cover a campus event. This is what a 21st-century English major can do, given…
Before class, Watch this 10-minute introduction to Modern Interactive Fiction. Watch this 2-minute trailer for a documentary film on interactive fiction. (Optional: a version of the film is available online: GET LAMP… I’m featured at the 12:30, 17 minutes, and around 41 minutes. You may appreciate the snark I offer at 49 minutes.) In order to understand what…
Ordinarily, this would call for an all-nighter. I’m feeling rather worn down after 4 days of marking AP English exams, and there are 3 days to go, so I’m only going to have time to glance at the new version of Inform 7.
At the recent Computers & Writing conference, I found myself, in the Q & A during several sessions, strongly advocating coding skills as a 21st-century core literacy. (See Ian Bogost, Procedural Literacy. In the following reflection, I talk mostly about my use of Inform 7, but I also touch on Scratch.) Here at Seton Hill,…
I got an e-mail this morning from a multimedia developer who found my online version of Emily Short’s Metamorphoses, asking some technical questions about whether it is possible to give web-based users tasks to perform in an interactive fiction game, and have the game notify the outside world when the task is completed. I’m reproducing…
Programming games is an activity. A programming language is a kind of thing. Inform 7 is a kind of programming language. It is either the single-most important advance in interactive fiction in a decade, or an interesting idea doomed to fail. —Liza Daily —Natural Language Game Programming with Inform 7 (OnLamp.com) I’ve been teaching myself Inform…
Chartres cathedral used to have an actual bazaar in it, in the middle ages – you could buy vegetables, or even livestock, and it must have been mayhem sometimes: but that was all right, because the occasional runaway piglet was never going to be able to knock over the columns holding up the walls. Well,…
Inform 7, or I7, is a dramatic departure from what has come before. IF languages such as Inform 6, TADS, and Hugo are procedural, C-like languages, familiar to most any modern computer programmer. I7 doesn’t take that approach. Instead, its language is based on English. I’ll pause a moment to let that sink in. Rather…