Re:Writing web-based interactive fiction with Ink
by WorldMaker on Thursday April 29, 2021 @09:09PM
(#26988808)
Inform 7 progress has been "slowed" the last few years because a lot of work has been put into refactoring it to be more re-useful. Possibly not to the exact same extent as Ink has been to embedding in C#/Unity, though something resembling that has been part of the motivation.
The refactoring isn't necessarily making it "simpler" (especially compared to something like Puny Inform or even the people that have resurrected ZIL for the challenge of writing games with it), as it is defining a higher level object (world) model than just raw VM characteristics like Inform 6 or otherwise writing directly for a Z-Machine. But if it does reduce the coupling between stages of Inform 7 compilation it does offer some interesting tools for world building that Ink or Inform 6 can't quite offer.
A talk on some of the refactor progress and goals: http://inform7.com/talks/2019/06/14/narrascope.html
Said this, I'd like people knew Inform6 more, among IBG.pdf (Inform's Beginner Guide) and DM4.pdf (Inform6's manual).
The language is dumb easy. It's object oriented (almost literally, you declare in-game objects as... objects with properties), and the games can be run on legacy machines fastly, such as Amiga/Atari/68k Macs.
Here's an Inform6 libre game to start with:
http://www.amirrorclear.net/flowers/game/devours/
Also, I forgot: There's Puny Inform, a reduced subset from Inform6 with few changes here and there in order to create games targetting the 3th version of the Z-machine. Thus, the games will run anywhere, even on the C64, Spectrum, MSX, BBC, Linux, OSX, Windows... everywhere.
https://github.com/johanberntsson/PunyInform
Example on a commercial Z3 game:
https://hlabrande.itch.io/tristam-island
A libre one (Calypso):
http://microheaven.com/ozmoo/games/calypso/calypso.z3 https://github.com/dave-f/calypso