NaNoWriMo Text Adventures

[squirmelia]

NaNoWriMo starts soon, and as I've been reading Twisty Little Passages, I'm vaguely contemplating writing some kind of interactive fiction/text adventure type thing for it.

[Poll #1474777]

Comments

[kevandotorg.livejournal.com]

Inform 7 is good, if you haven't picked a language to write in yet. It's ostensibly a natural language parser, so the actual code you write looks like this:-

The office is south of the corridor. "You are in a small, badly-lit office." In the office is a table. On the table is an apple. The apple is edible. The description of the apple is "A glossy red apple."

It can be very finicky about the correct way to phrase your code (although that's quite a nice irony, making it feel a bit like playing a text adventure in order to create one), but the manual is full of neat little examples that you can drop into your code and play around with.

In terms of word counts, I think there's an option somewhere to dump all possible printable text into a file (primarily so that you can hand it to a proof-reader who can check your writing without having to play through every single branch of the entire game). But counting the natural language code is probably fair enough. Inform 7 code is actually quite enjoyable to read uncompiled.

[janieluk.livejournal.com]

Seconded on this. The main alternative, TADS 3, is a more standard programming language, but enjoys far less support than Inform, which produces Z-code (i.e. Infocom adventure language) games or Blorb files. alextiefling has more experience than me in using Inform, although I've done some simple stuff.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I think I'll start off with trying Inform and then if I don't get on with it very well, will try TADS then.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

You got there before me.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Not picked anything yet. Was almost tempted to code it myself, but that is a bad idea and I'd then just spend all the time fiddling with the code and avoiding writing any content.

I have finished reading Twisty Little Passages now and it also mentioned, among other things, Inform and TADs, as being good, so shall look at those.

Thanks for the suggestion. I shall start by looking at Inform 7 then, I think. :)

[kevandotorg.livejournal.com]

Give me a shout if you want any pointers or tech support.