Well informed

[rbandrews]

I've just spent most of the evening writing a game in Inform 7. This may be my new favorite thing. It's all the fun of making a game, but without the parts I'm bad at: getting caught up in the minutiae of pixels and threads and engine design. It's actually more compelling than the new Neal Stephenson book that showed up today.

Comments

[notyourwendy]

It's actually more compelling than the new Neal Stephenson book that showed up today.

That serious praise, from you.

[rbandrews]

I always have these clever ideas for games, and then, while I'm in the process of writing the game, I convince myself the idea actually sucks and don't finish it. So I've spent a lot of effort making tools to let me finish something before that happens.

This lets me go from "I have a neat idea for a puzzle" to seeing it work in about as much effort as it would take to write down what the idea actually is. I was skeptical at first, but it looking like English is actually a huge cool feature. It looks like this:

The fence is a door and scenery. It is north of the room called inside the bushes. Through it is The Prairie.
The description of the fence is "The boards look a little loose, like you could probably pull one off."

Understand "board", "boards" as the fence.

The fence is unopenable.

Instead of pulling or prying the fence:
now the fence is open;
say "You pry a board open, revealing a passage to the north you can fit through."