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Interactive Fiction

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Cloak of Darkness - getting started in IF. The "Cloak of Darkness" specification The various implementations have been made as similar as possible. That is, things like object names and room descriptions should be identical, and the general flow of the game should be pretty comparable. Having said that, the games are implemented using the native capabilities of the various systems, using features that a beginner might be expected to master; there shouldn't be any need to resort to assembler routines, library hacks, or other advanced techniques. The target is to write naturally and simply, while sticking as closely as possible to the goal of making the games directly equivalent.

"Cloak of Darkness" is not going to win prizes for its prose, imagination or subtlety. The Foyer of the Opera House is where the game begins. And that's all there is to it... Acknowledgements.

Text Based RPG

Brass Lantern: Write a Text Adventure With Inform 7. Text adventures were some of the earliest computer games. A generation of hackers cut their teeth on ones such as Infocom's Zork. Graphical games have long since taken over the commercial games market, but a vibrant independent community has kept text adventures, also known as interactive fiction, alive.

For example, as many games were written for the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition as Infocom wrote in ten years. Games like Infocom's Zork were big hits back in the early 1980s. Want to write interactive fiction? Let's find out if it really is easy to use. Inform 7 I7 is a complete design system for interactive fiction. There's a lot more to I7 than that, but rather than wasting our time talking about I7, let's start writing our game. Getting Started For this tutorial, we'll create a simple game. Once you've installed Inform 7, start the program. Tip On the left is where we'll write the code to our game, called the "source". The release number is 1. Making the World. Brass Lantern Finding Your Way Around IFArchive. If you've been following the text adventure scene for a while, chances are you've heard GMD or the Interactive Fiction Archive mentioned.

You were told that the latest adventure was "on the archive," or that you needed to visit the archive to get an interpreter to play the newer text adventures. Sometimes people announce tools or games and they don't even mention the archive by name, saying instead that "the files are in /programming/tads2/examples", leaving you with no idea what they were talking about.

The text adventure community more or less expects you to figure out what the archive is and how to navigate it on your own. While this approach works, it can be extremely frustrating. This article will hopefully help you clamber up the archive learning curve. What The Archive Is A historical note: the archive was originally housed at GMD, the German National Research Center for Information Technology, the creation of Volker Blasius.

What is FTP, you ask? How the Archive is Structured. Playing, Studying and Writing Interactive Fiction (Text Adventure Games) Interactive Fiction -- Online Gallery (Dennis G. Jerz, Seton Hill University) Inform.