#inform 7

[prokopetz]

By contrast, the putting it on, inserting it into, and eating actions are not specified to apply to a carried thing: they perform an implicit taking attempt during their check rules, or may perform one in the eating action's case. [...] [T]he primacy of the carrying requirements rule [means] that numerous actions for which a better response would be an error regarding absurdity instead [attempt] an implicit take, e.g., if the moon is a backdrop, put moon in me would attempt to take the moon and dryly reply: "That's hardly portable."

—Proposals for the evolution of Inform E-0015: World model enforcement, subsection "Implicit taking"

While a discussion of the particulars and motivations of this proposed set of bug fixes is beyond the scope of a Tumblr post, I thought this blog's followership might appreciate the fact that, in Inform's present implementation, attempting to stick the Moon up your butt fails solely because the "inserting it into" action generates an implicit "take" action during its setup, and scenery objects are not valid targets for "take".

[golmac]

I'm calling my lyric storytelling widget for Inform 7 complete for now. It's a simple template that authors can use to add text without coding. Five possible endings. Might be a good toy for beginners (like me) to play with and experiment on.

Or anyone looking for ideas about making a choice game in Inform7

[manonamora-if]

Neo-Twiny Jam lil' entries

Because of course I made some. Filled up the max like last years.

The Lady with the Camellias

This is a short prototype parser, inspired by the titular book from Dumas fils. I thought 500 words would be enough to adapt one of the scenes from the book. It obviously wasn't. But hey, I learned how to make a simple Inform 7 game. If yall are lucky, maybe a longer version drop one day.

machina caerulea

A short sci-fi Twine game inspired by the tale of Bluebeard. Similar in style to last year's Collision. There are 3 endings to this one.

Bon Dieu ! Et une lessive aussi ?

Only available in French. A short surreal Moiki game, inspired by an IRL moment. It's really stupid, and it just took me a few hours to make. Make Moiki games, it's simple and fun!

[randomarceus]

You know what? Fuck you. [silently randomises your perception stat and changes the 'look' dialogue depending on what you got]

[thiskobold]

Interactive Fiction is great because it rewards my ADHD brain which wants to describe EVERYTHING in EVERY room in great and exhaustive detail

[definitelynotplanetfall]

me when i'm good at code

[bleedchan]

in inform 7, i’d like if it was easier to quickly pare parser verbs and overwrite the default responses, as well as enable things like lowercase only. i know how to do these things, but as a writer with i guess you could say a modern sense of prose it’d be nice to have it tied to like a ui option rather than having to write the same chunk of text yet again

this would involve a bunch of work that would all be similar i’d imagine. like the parser paring would probably be best as some kind of like, scrollable vertical list of entries and fields you can quickly change, or maybe tabs of categories, or something…

in a world where people could probably see i7’s syntax and mistake it for an llm, i think the best path forward is to embrace the totality of control creators have over responses, and the lack of embarrassing unintentional hallucinations that break character or immersion. exposing things like this in ui when it’s simpler and easier to do so is ideal, i think… it all compiles down to i6 in the end anyway, right..?

[manonamora-if-reviews]

The Loneliest House by Tabitha O’Connell

IFDB - Game - @tabitha-writes Note: this was a La Petite Mort entry, and submitted to the Bare-Bones Jam

Summary: You’ve always been drawn to the lonely old house on the hill outside your town. It’s been abandoned for as long as you’ve lived here; you’ve never seen it get any care or attention. To everyone else, it’s just a part of the scenery. But to you it’s always been something more–a mystery, an omen, a promise.

This is a short parser letting the players use only one command: examine (X / L), where the point is to examine the abandoned house, and its different element, as if you were exploring it. Examining an element gives you a description, which focuses on other smaller elements, which if you examine those will describe further details, and... so on and so forth until the details are simply too small to see, or until you examined all elements to reach the end.

The gameplay reminded me of Nested, where checking an element gives you details you can look out, each if checked will give out subsequent details, and... Except, unlike Nested, TLH doesn't loop back to repeat ad infinitum if you take one specific path.

As for the whole, it felt a bit voyeuristic, especially in the descriptions of each details of the house, as, even if it is abandoned, you sort of see yourself opening the door or looking out the scenery from the window. You wish you could be inside the house, but you can't. You're on the other side of the fency, gazing with envy at the house. It's pretty eerie...

Also: +1 for including a walkthough! -1 for not being able to pet the dog (/jk)

[kastelpls]

Closure

played *Closure* by Sarah Willson and i thought this was a really cute parser game about helping a friend overcome a breakup by infiltrating into this dude's room and finding objects to help her move on.

there's a lot of personality in the writing and i quite enjoyed the interactivity in the game. also, was surprised to see how the online version used instant messaging client-styled visuals.

that was adorable lol.

[firestia]

Little pony princesses 💗

[prokopetz]

For all the development issues it sometimes causes, I appreciate Inform's absurdly detailed world model for the unhinged debugging output it produces. Like, what do you mean you're checking whether the "must remove worn clothing before eating it" rule is applicable? Exactly how often did this come up that it needed to be part of the standard world model enforcement rulebook?

[golmac]

today, on let's make if...

We're getting close to the end of coverage for Portrait with Wolf, believe it or not! It's a fairly short to-do list:

handling responses for parser errors

handling responses for standard rules verbs

limiting the parser to keep focus on the main four commands

I may write something about playtesting next week, since I've gotten lots of questions about it (both for testers and authors).

[ryllen]

the next thing u know, yuu would have the possession of malleus' bones

[umbralstars]

I think one of my favorite things about FF7 is how genuinely alien Gaia is. I think people gloss over how different this world is compared to ours and I don't just mean magic. Gaia doesn't have plate tectonics, or if it does it doesn't work the same as our world. The Lifestream isn't just a metaphysical space, it's a physical ocean under the crust of the Planet that acts of in a similar fashion to the mantle of Earth. The Lifestream can flow to the surface and tear apart the land or piece it back together in whatever way it sees fit. It can sink or create entire landmasses at random.

It can flow in ways to create a lush paradise or concentrate so heavily in areas they become borderline toxic. The Nibel Mountains (while I know part of their problem is there's been a reactor there for 40+ years; do remember Nibel is facing the same problem of ecological collapse the Midgar Wastes are, so that's why it looks Like That. Nibel is just lucky it had one little town instead of a giant city) are essentially Gaia's version of active volcanoes, just without the heat of magma and lava. The Lifestream is also so close that those mountains were intimately tied with the cycle of life and death in Nibel probably for generations. Rhadore, similarly, was a volcanic archipelago, and her people knew that well. Shinra? They refused to listen as they always do.

The Lifestream itself is also one of the most animist concepts I've ever seen in fiction. It is All Life. Everything upon Gaia is intimately woven into the fabric of the Lifestream; plants, animals, rocks, rivers, oceans, Everything. It contains all memories that have ever existed and will ever exist upon Gaia. The Lifestream is the movement of the waves, the rushing course of rivers, the memories of materia, the slopes of the mountains, the rustling of plants and leaves, it is the souls of all things, it is mortal and gods alike.

The world we see in FF7 proper is a fantasy world that is slowly being consumed by capitalism and a cyberpunk hellscpe (those are often the same things). It is a fantasy world that has forgotten what it once was, what it still is. It is about a people who have been utterly disconnected from the very river of life that created and sustains them.

And I just think that's neat.

[thiskobold]

The urge to make every thing that comes to mind in Inform 7 even though I know that I'll burn out in two seconds from a lack of planning and the prospect of actually doing it will seem so much larger and more imposing when I sit down to do it and it's really just a much better idea to work on one game so follow me so that I can talk about making a game about a boat and it's sinking and hey you know what I want I want strawberry milk I'LL EAT YOUR FUCKING SOUL LIKE A BAGEL I'LL CUT YOU IN HALF AND ok byeeeeeee

[definitelynotplanetfall]

Annoyances from dealing with backdrops in I7. Backdrops suck and you shouldn't use them.

Backdrops are objects that can be seen and interacted with from multiple locations, as opposed to most objects which have exactly one location at a time - except this is faked. They are regular objects that Inform moves around to follow the player and the player specifically. If you have a "sky" backdrop that is in every outdoor room, checking "if paul can see the sky" when Paul is not in the same room as the player, it will fail even if he is in a room that the sky would be in if the player was there. If you want NPCs to do stuff independently while the player isn't watching, and need them to do these things programatically/simulationistically rather than teleporting and hardcoded-state-setting between setpieces, then you had better hope they don't need to interact with any backdrops to do this.

When you create a backdrop you can set its location in 3 ways:

as an arbitrary set of rooms.

as everywhere in a given region. (functionally the same, as regions cannot change during play.)

as a description of rooms - it will show up in every room matching some description.

Let's say I want to make a door that can be moved around, because I7's built in doors cannot (I gather because they are shackled to the specification of I6). Consider this code. (>'s are because tumblr handles indentation poorly.)

When play begins (this is the initialize pseudoor locations rule): >repeat with D running through pseudoors: >>move the D backdrop to all rooms connected by D.

This does not compile. The reason this does not compile is it assumes the stupidest possible intention: to store "rooms connected by D" as the condition for rooms the pseudoor is in. The compiler wags its finger at you because at the time the condition will be checked, the variable D will not exist. There is no way to bake the description so it becomes "all rooms connected by <whatever the current value of D is when the code runs, and then keeping that value when D changes or goes away>". This makes descriptions great for enabling sweeping rule conditions and the like, but makes them basically useless to store as a value.

Well, you could get the list of rooms connected by D, and that's a static list of objects you could store somewhere if you liked. Except there is no way to move a backdrop to an arbitrary set of rooms during play, only when it's initially created. This limitation exists, as far as I can tell, for literally no reason.

Okay, so you can make your own backdrop-ish kind and handle the movement yourself, right? Well that's complicated.

Visibility checks are easy. There is an activity, "deciding the scope of something," which is run exactly once when anything's visibility is checked. So you can move all your backdrops in a "before deciding the scope" rule. A little computationally expensive but not that bad.

There is no place to hook in to run code once per touchability check. There are "reaching inside" and "reaching outside" rulebooks, but these are run potentially mutliple times per touchability check and if you add your code to them, will still fail if you move your pseudo-backdrop to the right location, because all the reaching-inside and reaching-outside checks are already lined up based on where the object was. From within the reaching inside/outside rulebooks you cannot decide overall touchability, only the outcome for that particular layer.

This means that, for rigorously correct behavior, you must update positions before every touchability check that might run for a custom backdrop, everywhere in your code, including rewriting rules and phrases added by extensions, because you cannot add to or override the overall touchability checking logic in the necessary way.