Interactive fiction jam delayed; more resources

Rather than lose ¼ of my participants, I got everyone to agree on moving the date to Monday instead of today. Which works out well because it’s Labour Day, a useless holiday that has no festivities to keep people busy! Of course, the people participating who have spoken to me already know this, but who knows - there could be lurkers.

Anyway, I’ve been realizing the kind of effort that goes into making an awesome Inform 7 game like Violet. It would take more than four hours to produce something like that, especially as complete beginners. So I’m thinking that we’re going to have to tend more towards creating short stories with a bit of interactivity, for fear of having things spiral out of control.

At a bare minimum, I’m thinking of suggesting that everyone watch this video by Aaron Reed to get a basic introduction to Inform 7 and its integrated development environment (IDE). Then, go through this tutorial by Stephen Granade for a more hands-on introduction to the system - learning to create rooms, props, and rules. I’m hoping that’s a good enough baseline to produce something in a few hours without losing time on learning the basics.

Aside from all of that I’ve been busy looking into a variety of Inform 7 things. I get to be like that when presented with an extensible system. Rather than clog up my tumblr with a huge list of stuff, I’ve put everything I’ve found up on SimpleNote:

It’s worth looking through to see if there’s anything that inspires you. Maybe you want to make a really conversation heavy game - if so, check out Eric Eve’s numerous conversation-related extensions (among other things). Maybe you want to make something modern involving computers and other real life objects - Emily Short has some extensions for that (again alongside a lot of other stuff). She also has an extension for incorporating mood variations in your non-player characters… And now I’m just repeating everything I wrote in SimpleNote. Go on through the general notes for some information on best practices and other junk, and then the extensions one for fiddly stuff you might like.

Finally: I’m working on making a list of themes to pick from. I’d be happy to take suggestions. My intent is for the theme to provide a mental challenge, since you can’t just write whatever you want. At the same time, it should be broad enough that different interpretations are possible. So here’s what I’ve got so far:

  • Companionship (writing other people/creatures is hard, this may be a cruel option)
  • Underwater (courtesy of Vael, though I’d rather we didn’t all write some Atlantis/BioShock story)
  • Possession (interpret any way you please)
  • Metaverse
  • Duality (courtesy of Crate, but I dunno - contrasting two disparate parts or elements is a pretty abstract theme)
  • Underworld (Crate)
  • Recycling/renewal (Crate)
  • Hostile negotiations/enemy of your enemy (Crate)

I know, it’s not a terribly impressive list. I thought of a few more but.. uh… I forgot to write them down. So, please do suggest more! Just don’t say Brave New World or Stranger In A Strange Land or anything like that. Come now, we’re better than that. To make life easier, I’m also going to suggest we avoid high fantasy sort of stuff because it’s incredibly difficult to do well.

So yeah, that’s where we’re at! I’m having a lot of fun with this.

**Link to a .rar of extensions I thought might be useful, up to date as of September 2nd 2012: http://uninotes.thebcn.net/i7x.rar

Installation instructions: * Extract all .i7x files into one folder (note the ATTACK extension in its own folder) * Open the Inform IDE * Click File * Click “Install extensions” * Ctrl+a to select all files * Click ok

Bonus: documentation for all extensions is available once they’re installed. Go to the Documentation pane, click on “Installed extensions” below the final chapter of the manual, and then click on the name of an extension.**

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