A few days ago I asked people in several forums to tell me what IF tools they wished existed. Here is a collation of the major themes. (This misses out a handful of very specific requests about what specific existing systems should do — it’s more an attempt to put together some general patterns.) I … Continue reading “What people said about the Missing Tools (and some that aren’t missing at all)”
This Sunday (March 30, 2:15 PM) the Oxford/London IF Meetup group is having a meetup with guest presentations by Graham Nelson (Inform) and Eric Eve (TADS 3’s adv3lite library), and general discussion about what kinds of tools and toolsets we’d like to see in interactive fiction. In prep for that, I’d like to open this … Continue reading “The Missing Tools”
As promised, some highlights from today’s Oxford tools meetup: Eric Eve took us through a demonstration of adv3lite, his slimmer library for TADS 3 for users who don’t want or don’t need all the features of adv3. It’s designed to be intentionally moderate in what it models, not intended to grow to encompass all possible … Continue reading “Oxford Tools Meetup”
I get a fair amount of email from people asking me to review their new IF creation tool and give feedback. Unfortunately, I’m usually not able to do extensive IF tool critiques for free. It’s work that overlaps with the type of work that I do on a paid basis; on average, most new tools people send … Continue reading “IF Tool Development in general”
In the Missing Tools discussion some time ago, one of the things people mentioned wanting more of in IF was procedural text generation, which here is meant specifically as the ability to have the computer describe complex world model states or story events without having to hand-author every possible variation. This is an area where … Continue reading “Procedural Text Generation in IF”
Today’s question, gathered from Twitter a little while back, is this: How do you go from the macro to the micro, i.e. from a big, broad idea for a game to the concrete instantiation of it? A long time ago I wrote Idea to Implementation, a discussion of how to get from implementation to completed … Continue reading “Mailbag: Macro to Micro Ideas”
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 