Erik Temple, creator of many extensions for Inform 7 that do animations, sprites, and lots of shiny things, has a new demo up on his blog, this time demonstrating a text-game playable without typing.
It’s a really good piece of work and shows real potential for making text games accessible: teaching the syntax while letting people get on with the game. But it also highlights one of the text games major problems – there’s way too much choice.
This link appeared first as a comment, then as a tweet, and finally now as a blog-post, which is all back to front. But this is archaelogy, which works downwards.
The short version is: presenting Kingdom Without End by Shannon Cochran, a multi-choice input game from 2001 about archaeology, that is perhaps the best example of CYOA written in a parser-IF style, and not only that, it’s a damn fine piece of work too.
It sometimes feels like I’m releasing a new version of this every two days, but Interactive Parsing is now up to Version 4. The new version is substantially faster, especially if what you’re typing makes sense. Running on my MacBook, it now feels like a normal command line. And on Quixe, well, it’s not too bad.
A quick one to say the first, extremely crashy version of Make It Good is now working with Interactive Parsing enabled and available to play with here.
Interactive Parsing (as explained here and here) has now been updated to version 3.
This version adds support for suggesting and accepting words longer than the 9-letter Inform default, and for commanding characters using the “JIMMY, GIVE ME THE GUN” syntax.
This resolves all the known missing features of IP, so it should be now good to go in any game-project you care to throw at it. It also runs under Quixe once more, thanks to some help from Zarf.
I’m working on tidying up the tool I’ve written for making Undum game-files from a simple text format.
While I get that sorted, I thought I’d publish the single most useful other Undum thing I’ve got, which is an extra function to avoid writing in HTML. Following I7’s lead, I’ve called it “say”, rather than the Undum default, which is “write”.
Interactive Parsing is now up to version 2. This latest release handles disambiguation prompts by the parser.
This release means the extension is now at playable quality and while I’m sure there are still improvements to be made, the extension is serviceable with no known bugs.
The approach taken to deal with disambiguation is reasonably interesting, so I’ll talk more about that after the cut.
Version 1 of my I7 extension for real-time input parsing, as demoed last week, is now available to download and try out in your projects.
Fiction is a Three-Edged Sword 