Inform 7 – Page 12 – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

Inform 7 Build 5T18

…is up. This is a milestone in a number of ways: it’s the 15th Birthday edition of Inform, and it finishes a number of things that have been in progress since January of last year. The Mac IDE comes with a simply awesome table of contents, which lets you view just a small section of your code at a time, or zip back up to the top level; this will filter through to Windows as well. I already find this so essential that during the testing phase I hated those occasions when I had to go back to using the last official build to test user problems…

So you want multi-player IF?

Thanks to Jesse McGrew, there is now a system for same! See this announcement, which — despite the date and initial goofy front — is actually true. You can make yourself an account, create your own realm within the larger multiplayer world, and compose a game in Inform 7 that allows multiple players to connect and play simultaneously.

Yeah, really.

Assorted News

There is indeed an IF Art Show again this year; deadline, May 2.

Play This Thing! is reviewing Photopia (not my review, this time, but I thought people might be interested).

Jeff Nyman has another interesting post on his IF classes, this time on why his next class will be using TADS 3 rather than Inform 7.

Grandtextauto points to Hypertextopia, a program especially for the creation of “axial” hypertexts — there’s one main line of narrative to follow, with what might be considered footnotes, expansions, or embellishments. I wasn’t thrilled with the couple of examples I briefly looked at, but it represents a possibly-interesting alternative take on how hypertext design might be done.

PC Plus article out

The current issue of PC Plus (in the UK) is carrying a tutorial I wrote on interactive prose and description. (Code samples in Inform, but the design advice applies to other languages as well.) This is one of two; the second piece, on action design, is due (I think!) for next month.

A really intriguing post on IF and storytelling

Jeff Nyman has written up some experiences using Inform 7 and TADS 3 with authors new to IF (or at least new to IF programming) and their responses about storytelling this medium and the specific tools involved.

Deluxe Doors extension

Added a new extension:

Allows for doors that are implemented as having independent ‘faces’ — to put a knocker on that can only be seen from on side, for instance, or to allow the player to lock one side with a key but the other with a latch. Also introduces a ‘latched door’ kind.