Category: Inform 7

Too Many Things! (Or: in which Emily takes a little vacation)

I get lots of email about IF. Lots. And lots. This is flattering. However: the amount of time it takes to get through my inbox is becoming unworkable, and I need to get some other things done. So I am taking a break from some of it; specifically:

If you have bug reports or feature requests for Inform 7, they should go to Graham. That’s where they always wind up anyway, so you’re not missing anything by sending them there.

If you have coding support questions about Inform 7, they should go to rec.arts.int-fiction or to the #I7 channel on ifMUD. These days there are a fair number of people who have written complete I7 games and are competent to help with most requests. (We will still be monitoring the extensions-development thread.)

If you have hint requests about one of my games, they should go to rec.games.int-fiction.

If you want to comment on a review I wrote about your game, or give feedback on one of my games, that is terrific. I’m still interested, but I don’t promise to answer immediately. Please don’t feel snubbed.

If you have an I7 extension, you should go ahead and send it to me; I don’t promise that service will be instant, but this is one area where I don’t have a great substitute for me, so I will try to make sure any new material gets posted at least once a week. Please give your email a sensible subject line, such as “[I7] New Extension”.

If you want beta-testing, design guidance, help tracking down the URL of something you think I posted 5 years ago, etc., this is not really the best time.

Play It Yourself

On a previous post, we’ve been discussing what makes a game feel like work to play, and what doesn’t — and a lot of the answers come back to matters of polish. Is the game bug-free, or close to it? Are puzzles well clued? Are there responses to lots of unexpected commands? Are boring, repetitive actions omitted? Is the space easy enough to understand that the player doesn’t need to map? Does the game help track important clues for the player, so he doesn’t have to take notes?

People keep recommending beta-testing as a way to find and correct such flaws. This is good advice, but it misses a point I think is just as essential:

Play it yourself.

Continue reading “Play It Yourself”

I7: New Version Up

For those who don’t follow rec.arts.int-fiction, there is a new release of Inform 7. In addition to fixing over a hundred bugs reported in the previous release, it provides dynamic string handling for the first time, and regular-expression matching.

This means that it’s possible to (for instance) run regular expressions on the player’s command to modify it before parsing; that it’s possible to make any “to say” phrase produce upper-, lower-, title-, or sentence-cased output; and that it’s easier to store and read back text files for use by Glulx.

There are other goodies too.

Tiny new extension

Have added a “Mood Variations” extension to let authors mark up text to have varying effects depending on the mood of the person currently spoken to. It’s meant to be compatible with several approaches to conversation (and uses the same “current interlocutor” variable as Eric Eve’s conversation extensions). The “[set {mood}]” token then also lets you set the NPC’s current mood in the middle of other text.

Not a huge deal, really.

Two really quite minor extensions

Now that the I7 extensions page has RSS, it may be redundant to announce these at all, but I have added two little extensions in the last couple of days. One is called “Modified Exit”, designed to deal more sensibly with cases where the player wants to go somewhere but is sitting on an enterable supporter or is inside an enterable container; it makes a few other tweaks to the standard rules on exiting as well.

The second is even more tiny: Property Checking goes through and makes sure all your rooms and objects have descriptions, as a test. (It will not do this in released games — this is purely a debugging function.) I built it because I was startled to find in my (slowly ongoing) Floatpoint revision that I had one or two things about which the player could still see nothing special. Oops.