Greetings. I’m Biophysicist. I’m a pretty good programmer, which is why I got into IF - I even wrote my own IF language before discovering Inform 7. (It’s been lost, along with many other things, to a virus that forced me to format my hard drive. No big loss, though - it was very early in the development process when I lost it.) I’m horrible at puzzle design, though, which is my biggest weakness: I can write very complicated puzzles, but actually making them interesting is a challenge, to say the least. My other biggest weakness is actually finishing anything: I’ve started at least twelve IF projects, many StarCraft projects, three standalone RTS games, and two browser-based games, in addition to the above-mentioned IF language, and finished none of them.
Some random facts about myself, some of which I bring up because they /will/ affect how people deal with me on these forums, and some which I bring up for no good reason:
-I’m psychotic. I have hallucinations and get very angry randomly.
-I have a learning disability, which makes it nearly impossible for me to understand things unless I develop them myself.
-I have memory and processing issues, which frequently cause me to forget things, or misremember them. This, combined with the above two issues, means that I’m usually very hard to get along with.
-I’m 16.
-I am male.
-I am bisexual, though I refuse to accept this as immutable.
-I have a very weird sense of humor, possibly related to my psychosis.
-You may find me moping or trolling about personal issues. When this happens, it is usually best to ignore me, or a flame war will start.
-I am something of a Christian zealot.
Just really came across IF (as far as authoring) a few months back and jumped into Inform7 as my language of choice. My first experience with IF was probably about 20 years back when I was introduced to a MS DOS version of “Adventure”. I was younger so I never made it very far, but I’ll never forget the way the descriptions of the caves evoked such strong imagery in my mind.
I’m now nearing completion on my first IF, a small “escape” style game that I’ve really learned a ton working on. And I’m looking forward to participating in upcoming competitions or events as I’m able!
Hey, I’m Chris, 33 and living in Philadelphia. I played the Zorks and Scott Adams games and various other Infocom titles back in the 80s on my trusty C64, and discovered Inform 6 back in the late 90s. (Sordid confession of the day: Nord & Bert was my favorite Infocom title back then.) I had started a game in that but apparently without enough forward momentum to keep plugging away at learning I6 syntax. I’d found out about I7 a couple years ago but hadn’t played with it much; I play IF off and on, depending on how much time school and work leave me for that sort of pursuit.
I got an iPhone recently and downloaded Frotz for it, and bored a a few weeks ago, played “Lost Pig” on it. It kind of re-ignited my IF bug, so I’m exploring the latest version of I7 (which I appreciate so much after my I6 experiences) and having a go at converting the game I started in 2000. (This is a bit hampered by the fact that I have lost the I6 source code for the game; I still had a .z5 file so I ran it through the Reform decompiler and am using that output to help me along – it’s not reader-friendly in any way but at least all my text strings are intact!) I have a much better idea of how the conflict and plot might go and I love the scene features that I7 offers. I might actually get somewhere this time.
Here’s one more considering “running for the hills” as Traviswf put it. My name is Rikard Peterson, and I’m a relatively long-time (about ten years, I think) r*if reader (and occasional poster). I work as a music teacher. (Wind instruments, so you can probably guess how I got my internet nickname.)
The first piece of IF I played was Augmented Fourth. I had found the IF Archive and was browsing it at random when I saw a file name that caught my attention. Luckily, it was a great, and not too difficult, game. So here I am.
I don’t think I’ll ever write IF, unless you define IF the way some people do, and include graphical adventure games. In that case, I’ve already written one. (If you haven’t played it, don’t do so now. I’m hopefully only days away from releasing an updated special edition of it.) I’ve also ported the game engine that my game uses to Mac OS X.
Trumgottist! You’re Rikard Peterson? Well who’d have thought. I don’t suppose you recognize me from the AGS forums, heh? Went by many names for a while, the latest being “Trovatore”. Well, happy to see a familiar face! Enjoy your stay!
No, sorry, I don’t recognise you from the AGS forums (only from r*if). But I’m an infrequent visitor there anyway, which is not so strange considering that I don’t use AGS.
Oh? But we talked on the AGS forums, via PMs. I don’t remember what about, but I think I’d asked you for some music for a project I never actually did anything with, quite (quite!) a while ago. You sent me some lovely midis.
Ah well. Maybe we should take this to PMs anyway. And it’s still great to see a familiar face.
(Looks at old AGS PMs.) Ah! Now I remember you. “Trovatore” just didn’t mean anything to me. Had you said “Rui Pires”, on the other hand… Now it’s my turn to be surprised when connecting the dots.
Hi, this is Jonathan Blask, author of Death To My Enemies and hopefully something better at some point. It is nice to see Trumgottist here. Frasse and the Peas of Kejick was a cool game. I was happy when I saw it featured on an episode of Cinematech on the now-defunct TechTV.
I’ve been checking this place out lately and decided it was time to finally register. Nice job, Merk, on setting this up.
I’m Lea. My IF-cred consists of organizing last year’s IF Writing Month, writing “Byzantine Perspective” (which was in the 2009 Comp), and doing the layout for the PAX East “How to Play IF” postcard.
As much as it makes sense to draw these distinctions (which is to say: not much), I am an “artist,” not a programmer. The computer languages I know are Inform 6/7 and Processing/Arduino. My official training is in architecture and tangible design – making real actual physical things at the human scale, for people to touch, wear, and inhabit – which doesn’t really sound a lot like IF, until you think about both of them in terms of implicit narrative through interactions with objects and spaces. [Secretly, as I say in the hints for the post-Comp release of “Byzantine Perspective,”
this game was written as a brief meditation on the sensory dissociations afforded by contemporary telecommunications and the relative emphasis on visual cues in the literary perception of architectural space, and as a gentle mockery of Beaux Arts values in architectural planning.
…But I also love IF because I am intrigued by games but have neither the skill nor patience to play anything that is not turn-based and fairly short. (Seriously, I had to pester my housemate to play Braid in front of me because it took me multiple minutes to hop on the first Goomba-equivalent. Similarly for Super Paper Mario. And I didn’t even attempt Portal. The Majesty of Colors is more my speed.) Also, I live in the same city as the IF Archive; how cool is that?
My favorite IF game is “The Gostak,” and the only game I’ve played all the way through without hints or walkthrough was “Suveh Nux.”
Hi everyone,
My name is Giles. I’ve been lurking around here for a while now, and on r*if (generally keeping my head down and avoiding the trolls). I’m probably a bit older than most people here, being in my late 40s.
My first introduction to IF was back in the early 80s playing the Hobbit and a few others on the BBC/Acorn and Sinclair ZX81 and then some of the Magnetic Scrolls titles.
Some guys I knew back then wrote an early commercial IF authoring system called Graphic Adventure Creator (which was really just text adventures with illustrations). I wrote some of the user manual for that, and also wrote a couple of GAC games that sank without trace - mainly because they weren’t very good and also because round about then the (at the time mind-boggling) power of the new 16 bit machines like the Amiga and Atari ST, were making other sorts of games the flavour of the month.
Then a couple of years ago I was looking for something to play that captured the flavour of those old text adventures and discovered a thriving IF community, complete with brand new and improved authoring systems.
I’ve been tinkering around, familiarising myself with Inform, and have at last embarked on the process of writing an absurdly over-ambitious game (working title: Incursion).
I’ll probably be asking a whole bunch of stupid noob/senile questions over the next few months, and thought it was only polite to introduce myself (my mother brung me up proper).
Looking forward to getting to know you all
Giles
Actually, I was just thinking today that one thing glaringly missing from academic IF theory is study of space in IF, and that architecture could be an excellent lens for considering how space/place works in IF. Not that I know enough about architecture to attempt such a thing.
…and I’ve started playing up the mock-offense when someone asks me this. What a scandalous question!
There is definitely some writing out there that ponders the conventions of IF spaces – this article springs to mind – and a lot of firmly held opinions about the right way to design “maps” (that is, the usually-highly-planar world layouts that are common in IF). Undoubtedly many of these are from people who “don’t know a lot about architecture,” so don’t let that stop you from sharing your own thoughts about the matter.
I’m Viv, in eastern Scotland. I’ve played text adventures since about 1980, though I started very young. During my computer science degree in the 90s I dabbled with MUDs and coding adventures for them in LPC. Then when Inform was developed I started converting my MUD adventures into Inform. Generally though I’m more of a player than a coder, and also more of a programmer than a writer so I can be short of ideas. But I’m determined to give things a bash. I’ve recently completed my history PhD, so have a bit more spare time on my hands at the moment, and am going to have another go at learning Inform 7 properly.
I also took part in the Interactive Fiction Writing Month last year, which helped a lot. But I have much more still to learn, so am going to have a proper go now.
So you have degrees in both CS and History? Wow. That’s not only very impressive, but sounds like you might one of those rare individuals who have both sides of the brain needed for authoring IF. If you need any help getting your bearings with them, just ask!
To say nothing of how the notion of a left/right brained logical/creative dichotomy is largely pseudoscience, as someone with a computer science degree I’ve always found the notion that I must therefore be an emotionless android incapable of creativity to be rather offensive.
And then there’s the fact that the “logical” left side of the brain is the only hemisphere with a significantly lateralised function - that function being language, something you might expect to be useful to both IF and history, if not computer science.
Dan Doyle, 29 year old Michigan gamer. Got stuck on Zork I-III and forbidden castle in the early years, then discovered Enchanter series just a year ago. Since then I’ve been heavily back into IF and was very excited to discover Inform 7.
Back in the day my cousin and I used to make simple IF games in GWBasic- Inform is much better! I’m really excited to get a few games under my belt here, and any feedback any time would be great.
