I recently picked up Inform again. Are people still writing and posting games? Where are they being published?
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They are! There have been 34 Inform games published this year and 93 last year. I think the biggest year ever for Inform was in 2000 with 120 games. There are a lot of good systems now though (like Dialog, a Prolog-style writing system, or Adventuron which makes graphics easier). TADS is still in use and there are ADRIFT games each year.
Inform games are mostly entered into competitions; the biggest is IFComp at ifcomp.org. Spring Thing and Ectocomp are also pretty big.
The Text Adventure Literacy Jam and Parsercomp are competitions just for parser games. Parsercomp is going on right now if you want to check it out (I have a couple of entries in it and am biased to want people to see all the games in it, there are a lot of fun ones)!
https://itch.io/jam/parsercomp-2026/entries
If you’d rather see the most popular Inform games of the last 10 years, there’s a list on IFDB here:
(the top 3 are all limited parser games, a trend in the last 10-12 years where the amount of verbs is restricted).
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Awesome! I am currently writing a … well, not a sequel… let’s call it… adjacent… game to my classic “Invasion of the Second-Hand Shirts”. It might be terrible.
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Yes, most definitely.
You used to use ADRIFT 3.9 and 4.0. Invasion of the Second-Hand Shirts was written in the latter. There is still a small, but strong ADRIFT community, but I think everyone uses ADRIFT 5.0 nowadays. You might find it easier to use that. I know you’ve written at least one game in Inform 7, so stick with whatever suits you.
The vast majority of people in this community would publish their games by entering it in a competition, simply because it gives you greater exposure to the people in this community. However, the vast majority of IF authors are not in this community and their games are published all over the place. There are so many that it’s hard to keep track.
My gut feeling is that most authors (including those outside this community) publish their games on itch.io. I know I do.
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I’ve tried but I’ve never understood ADRIFT5. It seems too complex. Like, I’ll think of x or y, and while there might be a way to do it I can never figure it out. And in inform I can copy segments of code to the clipboard and paste it, then editing changes into it. I can’t do that in ADRIFT beyond copying the contents of a field.
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@duodave ! I remember you from the Adrift forum, and for A Party to Murder. Great to see you’re writing games again!
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