11–20 of 26 posts
There's various lists of good ones to try if you're new to the art form. Lost Pig I think was a good intro.
I was already familiar with the general concept and so the "word magic" of "Counterfeit Monkey" was an excellent new mechanic that really tickled the puzzly part of my brain.
Fascinating. How does one go about writing one of these in 2021? Do analogs to Unity/Unreal Engine exist for interactive fiction, or are people rolling their own?
Fascinating. How does one go about writing one of these in 2021? Do analogs to Unity/Unreal Engine exist for interactive fiction, or are people rolling their own?
There are a lot of options. Inform 6/7 is the most popular of the parser-based languages, with v6 being closer to a traditional programming language and v7 being a fascinating, natural-language based programming language that is powerful but can be difficult for those steeped in traditional programming languages to wrap their head around. Twine is the most popular choice-based system, supporting three languages that…
Ink has an IDE that exports to web, but there are also libraries for C# and JS that can be embedded in other programs, a Unity plugin and a VSCode language server.
inkJam 2021 happened recently: https://itch.io/jam/inkjam-2021
Fascinating. How does one go about writing one of these in 2021? Do analogs to Unity/Unreal Engine exist for interactive fiction, or are people rolling their own?
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/3-tools-to-create-your-own-tex... Writing your own is, of course, an option, but don't underestimate the task. A "simple" POC is usually very easy (my son and I did one in an afternoon). But building an engine with block-able exists, recursive containment, item interaction (eg. "turn bolt with wrench" and the custom functions they need), can be a much larger effort.
Fascinating. How does one go about writing one of these in 2021? Do analogs to Unity/Unreal Engine exist for interactive fiction, or are people rolling their own?
You can probably start with simple text console program that doesn't need any graphics. Second step can be ASCII style graphics added to it. Then you can do already something like The Hobbit with 2D graphical backgrounds. I don't think you need Unity or the like for any of it. It would probably be akin to writing a shell interpreter for the input at least.
Nah, Inform6 and the library gives you all: the parser, interpreter, prompt, verbos and objects. And it's free as in freedom.
Fascinating. How does one go about writing one of these in 2021? Do analogs to Unity/Unreal Engine exist for interactive fiction, or are people rolling their own?
A relatively recent 'awesome' repo for z-machine is here:
https://github.com/cschweda/awesome-z-machine
And the current implementation of zilf is here: