I am currently working on an IF project that is getting a little too big for me. I am hoping to find a coder/programmer/mentor with experience in using Inform 7.
I need someone to help out with larger / more challenging pieces of code. I would wait till I had a few pieces of coding needed (or one larger piece), and send requests to you as a “lot”, I would of course try completing the coding myself before asking for your help. Critique or your opinions during this time are also welcome. I’m afraid that my grandiose 
ideas just don’t match my Inform prowess 
, and thus, sometimes, I end up flailing in the deep end of the code. I am happy to keep you anonymous, as just a helper, or put you in credits or author section, depending on your role in this project, or am happy to discuss other terms.
ABOUT PARAGON
To sum up Paragon in one word would be Paradox…it is something that most people brush off as being absurd, but in the end, may well be proved to be true.
I gave someone the basic premise of the plot, and they came up with:
I wished to show how researched facts can be skewed to fit a certain perception. How easy it is to manipulate the truth and make it “seem” true. I plan to make Paragon a real interactive story, with multiple endings and the player learning as he goes along, my writing tends to evolve over the course of a story, so what I have as the basic lines build as I continue on. I am hoping to make Paragon an audio & graphic enhanced story, enhanced meaning I want it to be a well thought out work of text fiction, and have the audio/graphics to build the atmosphere, but not overpower the text.
I wanted to try to capture the 4 major “stereotypes” of the conspiracy field when writing this:
- The “player” (generalized you, but also a character himself, if an unknown one) is someone who knows whats going on, believes in the theories enough to try to get hard evidence. He’s what the “audience” would describe as “the tin foil hat guy”.
- The political figures are the stereoptypical people that brings forth the slogan “absolute power corrupts absolutely”
- The audience (generalised you & civilian NPC’s) are the ones who bypass reading anything of a “conspiracy” nature, believing it to be the result of the tin-foil hat man.
- The protagonist is a teenage girl, unaware of anything political. She has her friends, and her school hierarchy, but has a natural love for gossip/drama.
These are stereoptypical casts, for the beginning of the IF. They all have their predefined circles that the audience sees, they are predictable. What I want is FOR people to judge these people by their pre-moulded casts, and then to watch them grow and change through the twists that are more horrifying than of these people ever imagined, that the “truth” can be more horrifying then fiction.
Whether you believe in certain conspiracies or not, the very idea of a conspiracy intrigues the population, and keeps popping up again and again, no matter the place. Concentrating our circles to just the IF field, two such works on the idea of generalized conspiracies were found with a quick search:
The Plant by Michael J Roberts (this one 3rd place for puzzles)
The Cabal by Stephen Bond (An in joke of the IF community following the lines of a couple of IF’ers involved with taking over the community)
On this forum, I quickly came across two threads:
What’s Your Take? - Views on political/government based conspiracies
Conspiracy Theory Game - Regarding the field of IF being a good platform for CT’s.
With the age of the internet, people start believing whatever they see without forethought, the idea that if its internet-published “it must be true”. This has a forced spiral effect of the articles them becoming more and more dramatised versions, until they are barely recognizable.
An example of this is
Youtube Video - This video is a classic example. It is entitled “JFK Illuminati/New World Order Speech - 10 days before assassination”.
Since you may actually want to watch this video before you read this (the atmosphere/words/video do tend to give neat goosbumps), I will spoiler it.
[spoiler]This video can put goosebumps on your arm, and start making you believe in ulterior motives.
The real facts of this video:
It is listed as being given (around various of the internet) that this particular speech was given on the 12th November 1963 to a Columbian University. And it is the reason JFK was assassinated 10 days later. Apparently he was trying to warn others about a shadow governement, hence the line “Its dissenters are silenced”…
I’m sorry, but its an internet myth.
Link to the real Speech (audio, transcript & info)
This particular speech (even though its obviously been cut-off in the beginning and probably edited in other areas) was given on 27th April 1961, 2 years before his demise. JFK entitled the speech (the unedited version) “The President and the Press” it was given to help the press understand the need for “giving secrecy” to official government business, during the cold war. The press were giving out too much information and the all the enemies had to do was sit there and read the news.[/spoiler]
There is one part (although I am very fond of that entire speech) that provides a good synopsis of my idea:
“That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment-- the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution- -not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply “give the public what it wants”–but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.”
Thanks for your time 