>TAKE BUTT

[tgies]

So I'm going to try and enter the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. You should all learn Inform or something between now and the 30th of September and enter as well.

Did any of you people ever play those sorts of games? If so, what was your favorite? I was always partial to Infocom's Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which you can play online in a weird Flash-based thingjob on the BBC website, but be warned — it is really hard). Bureaucracy (also designed/written by Douglas Adams) is pretty good as well.

Comments

[damordecai.livejournal.com]

Ultravox owns

[darnn.livejournal.com]

I was on a major HHGTTG kick a few years back and tried playing it. But I realized I was spoiled by Lucasarts games, where you can't die. Maybe someday.

I'm sorry if this is on par with talking about the companion cube, but have you played the Strong Bad game from Telltale? I enjoyed it a lot more than the first installment of their Sam & Max. And just generally enjoyed it.

[tgies.livejournal.com]

Yeah I played that it was basically good

[nathew.livejournal.com]

love the sam and max games. i finally got around to finishing hit the road, but i suck so i looked at walkthroughs.

ever play the dig?

[darnn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I played all the LucasArts adventure games. I only started spelling and capitalizing correctly in English to not look bad on a Monkey Island forum (I'm Israeli).

I was talking about the new Sam & Max games, from Telltale, made up mostly of former LucasArts employees. I was actually surprised that the only one I finished, the first one, that was written in part by David Grossman, who worked on Day of the Tentacle and such, didn't really work for me. The Strong Bad game is co-written by Mike Stemmle, who worked on the original Sam & Max.

[nathew.livejournal.com]

yeah, i've played all those, too.

[darius.livejournal.com]

Awesome. I just played Lost Pig last week (the 2007 winner).

[tgies.livejournal.com]

yo AMFV was the bomb i forgot to mention that. how did I forget to mention that

I actually never was that into Zork but the Enchanter series (pseudo-sequel of sorts) was definitely fun

[nathew.livejournal.com]

hey, you should have told me about this inform thinger when i told you i wanted to make one of these kajiggers.

think a dumb son of a gun such as myself would be able to learn this? gimme a link or something.

[tgies.livejournal.com]

I figured you had done your research and concluded that "get tgies to do it" was the best course of action

Here's what the kids are using these days to make interactive fiction. You basically have a few options.

The most popular one, probably, is Inform. Inform will build straight to "Z-machine"* code, which is what all those old Infocom games use. There is a program to run Z-machine games for almost every platform -- I personally played a lot of these games on my Palm years ago, and I'm pretty sure everything down to the TI-83 calculator can do it.

There are two current versions of Inform, 6 and 7. These are massively different. While Inform 6 syntax looks basically like any other code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#Example_game), Inform 7 actually looks pretty much exactly like natural language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#Example_game_2). They actually both offer almost the same exact level of power (and, in exceptional circumstances, it's possible to drop I6 code in the middle of I7 to write out something finicky), so it's really down to personal preference. I was using I6 when I was into this stuff years ago, and I'm using I7 now. I7 also offers this nice little development environment thing you can write in. Check out http://inform-fiction.org/ for a bunch more code examples and stuff.

A lot of the kids these days are also using something called TADS, which is a newer system. It is also based on a scripting language like Inform. I really can't say much about it, having never used it, but it apparently suits a lot of people fine.

A third popular system is ADRIFT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADRIFT). The thing about ADRIFT is that there isn't really any sort of "coding" aspect to it -- it is all done in a weird little point-and-click interface. I did dabble in ADRIFT years ago, and actually paid to register it, but it is really not so great to work with. It can be really fiddly and full of hidden gotchas and stuff, it's a bit buggy, it's a newer and not-widely-supported system, and it just sort of feels "fake" and clunky in some way I can't quantify. You could definitely make some decent games in it, though, and people have. It's worth a try, anyway; maybe it'll be exactly what you're looking for.

---

* The Z-machine is a "virtual machine" (this is the technical term). Basically, Infocom wanted to be able to easily port their games to all the different kinds of personal computer which were popular in the 1980s, right? So what they actually did was they programmed their games for an imaginary computer for which they could write a sort of "emulator" (called an interpreter) for every major type of computer. That way, rather than having to port every game they published separately, they just had to port their interpreter once to each system and distribute it with every new game they released.

[nathew.livejournal.com]

oh yeah, inform 6 and 7 look pretty easy.

maybe i'll try something sometime, but i don't know if i want to do anything for the thing that's going on now.

[(Anonymous)]

your a poopdik

[tgies.livejournal.com]

You're a mystery!