The open-sourcing of Inform 7 has inspired me to resume work on my Inform 7 documentation project. I believe Inform 7 is a challenge to learn for most people, and different approaches can be a big help in understanding how to build rich worlds.
I am not a big fan of the official Inform 7 documentation, for one simple reason: it’s not easy to find out how to do basic world building! Why? There are no examples.
There are examples in the cookbook but they’re generally for a much more complicated case and don’t show how they change command responses.
My idea is to bridge the gap: to give newer users an entry point to understand the basics and have usable examples of how to do the most basic worldbuilding. I’m also attempting to make it reasonably fun and not too dry to read so people can scan it and know where to come back to when they get stuck.
I’m calling it Inform 7 At Play:
I would love as many eyes as possible on this early, incomplete version, to help me stay as consistent and high-quality as possible. What I’d love to know:
- Did you find any errors, or anything that’s unclear?
- What should I spend the most time covering next?
- Do you have any good examples of “common mistakes” and errors you find people run into a lot?
- Are there any other sections I could include?
- What can I do to make this even better?
Also, I’d love to know what people think of the format. I’m writing in Markdown and putting the results on Github for the moment, but Markdown code blocks in Github don’t text-wrap so they’re almost unreadable in mobile. At some point I may use a Github action to format and publish this as a more custom website.