Inform: Building your own Interactive Fiction

In class yesterday, we talked some about the process of programming games like this, and Christian asked later about the possibility creating something along the lines of Photopia for a final project. There are indeed free resources out there for creating these things, and if you're interested, I strongly recommend you look at Inform. (Go to the download page at the top right.)

It does have its quirks, but on the whole Inform is a nice way to go from nothing to a playable game in a very few steps. The problems start showing up when you want to do more complex things, but it works pretty well out of the box. Once you fire it up, work your way through the first few screens of the Manual. The documentation is quite thorough, but sometimes not very intuitive to navigate, so I recommend starting at the beginning.

If there's enough interest, I may hold a workshop to help get you started. Of course, doing an IF project will mean switching from whatever you've already proposed to me, so you'll need to consider whether the work you've already done toward your final can be folded into an IF, or if it's worth it just to move on.

At the very least, I recommend you try out Inform just to see the considerations and constraints that go into creating a work of IF.