This morning I demo’ed two short works of IF: Nine Points and The Legend of Grammy’s Apple. Both serve as demonstrations and tutorials of how to play and interact with works of interactive fiction (text adventures.) For a more detailed explanation of playing IF, read this useful overview.
After that, we discussed the importance of creating a map of the world in which your stories will occur using something called pen and paper. Then we took our first look at the Inform 7 authoring environment where you will be working to produce your first work of interactive fiction.
We just covered a few basic coding techniques to create “rooms”, the connections between these rooms, simple objects to place within these rooms, and then how to “run” your code to test it.
Next Monday (10/6) I will take us through the code to build a short game to get everyone started.
In the meantime, think about what kind of work you want to create, download and install Inform 7 on your computer, and visit our interactive fiction page (where there are links to games and free interpreters to play these games)
Some short games I recommend to check out are linked in a previous post.