I think my soul is fairly old then.
I think my soul is senile.
I suppose writing up an introduction is as good a means of procrastination as any.
Hello! Iām Toke. Or Tony if you prefer, the name next to the handle is my artist name under which I mean to publish any IF I may end up finishing.
Iām a 32-year-old Finnish university drop-out, mail man, rapper, poet, life-long aspiring authorā¦ you know what, Iāll end the list there. I have wide ranging interests, mostly in humanities. Languages, history and geopolitics are of particular note, I suppose. And literature, Iāve been a bibliophile from an early age.
Iām fairly new to interactive fiction. Iāve played a whole lot of graphic adventure games over the years, and although Iāve long been vaguely aware that text adventures used to be a thing, I guess I always conceived of them as a relic and curiosity, not something youād actually play and enjoy in the year of our Lord the current year. That all changed around six months ago when I played the Witness (not the Infocom Witness, the 3D puzzler one) and became absolutely obsessed with that game. Well, that game contained a video Brian Moriartyās lecture titled The Secret of Psalm 46 in full. Very interesting lecture. Itās about scavenger hunts and how they relate to the development of adventure games. One thing led to another and I found out that Moriartyās Trinity was a huge inspiration for the head developer of the Witness in his youth. So I decided to play it and I absolutely loved it! Iāll resist the impulse to let this turn into a review of that game, but anyways, it changed my trajectory.
So I tried my hand at other Infocom games, read some wikipedia articles, discovered Colossal Cave and eventually ended up watching Get the Lamp. Watching that documentary, I became aware that interactive fiction still has a whole scene and that there are many, many more modern games I could try. Which I found very appealing! As much as I appreciate Infocom, those games tend to have some game design choices that are a bitā¦ antiquated in their sensibilities. So by now Iāve played a bunch of indie classics such as Counterfeit Monkey, Anchorhead, Spider and Web, Lost Pig and Photopia. All of this in six monthsā time, so yeah, Iāve been busy inundating myself with this stuff lately.
I started teaching myself Inform 7 four or five days ago, and have started working on implementing, expanding and doing additional writing for a text-based puzzler a friend of mine designed a couple of years ago using Discord as a platform. Itās a pretty daunting project, really. Iām a sucker for those.
Anyways, Iāll not let this introduction spill out of proportion.
Nice to be here.
Hi all, glad to be here! Iāve been playing IF here and there when theyāve been recced on my usual fantasy book or puzzle game circles, but Iāve got more free time now (recently graduated from university) and decided to properly dive in. Find the classics and community favourites etc.
Hello. Been going by Jeffery Mewtamer(a combination of my actual first name and a reference to a pure narrative, no mechanics role-play me and my highschool friends did at the school lunch table) on most forums for 20+ years, but went with a shorter version here because spaces arenāt allowed and I hate underscores.
Anyways, I was introduced to Zork and a few other text adventures in the late 90s, but Iāve been an avid gamer for most of my life, starting out with Super Mario Bros 1 and 3 and Duck Hunt on my Sisterās NES when I was 4 or 5, and at some point owning at least one version of every major Nintendo system from the NES to Wii and GameBoy to 3DS excluding the VirtualBoy. and the main reason I never got a WiiU or Switch is because I went blind in 2012(though the switch is at the top of my hardware to buy list if my vision were to be miraculously restored tomorrow, mainly because its the only dedicated Gaming Handheld from the current console generation(Ialso played the PSP heavily and got a launch Vita). Among my favorite gaming franchises before going blind were Mario, Sonic, Pokemon, Zelda, most of Nintendoās other franchises, Disgaea, Golden Sun, Ys, and Tetris.
Iāve dabbled in text adventures a few times since going blind since they are one of the few game genres where blind accessibility is more or less guaranteed, though mostly knowing the names Zork and Infocom, I often ran into frustration due to all the guide dammit moments, unwinnable by mistake situations of the I should have reloaded that save I overwrote an hour ago variety, and how consulting a guide turns seemingly impossible into might as well read a transcript of someone else playing.
I have given thought to making my own games, and I do have a BS in Computer Science, but writing an IF engine from scratch in the language Iām most comfortable with(C++) is daunting, and the only existing framework I found at the time(Inform 7) had tools that left much to be desired(at the time, I was running a Linux setup that wouldnāt have let me use the GUI IDE for Inform, assuming it would work with Orca, and the output of the command-line inform 7 compiler was essentially useless for diagnosing problems in my code that prevented compilation even for the IF equivalent of Hello Worldā¦ And it was venting about that in the comments section of a blog that got me directed to this forum.
Still trying to figure out this forum, which doesnāt act like any other forum I can remember joiningā¦ the new posts page doesnāt seem to work, threads have no pagenation controls I can find and it seems like the only way to access recent posts in a thread is if itās a fairly recent thread or Iāve posted in it, and Iām not sure itās even possible to bookmark the forum indexā¦
Aside from video games and wishing I could find more I can actually enjoy with my useless eyeballs, I enjoy anime(I miss being able to read fansubs and Manga) and western animation, various types of mechanical puzzle, including twisty, packing, assembly/disassembly, sliding block, and puzzle boxes, dice(I am a dice dragon with a sizeable horde), Tabletop RPG(I wish I could find a D&D group to join, arts and crafts(I have a particular interest in tactile art for obvious reasons if youāre paying attention), maths(in particular, I like number theory(some of my favorite Integers are 3, 7, 13, 17, 23, 36, 37, 42, 49, 73, and 91) and geometry(I love me some polyhedra), and in addition to being a fan of the usual irrational celebrities like phi, pi, tau, and e, Iām quite fond of the Golden Trisection, which happens to be the ratio between edge length, lesser diagonal, and greater diagonal of a regular heptagon(and in case you donāt knowā¦ I donāt fully understand the reasoning, and thereās only like one web page Iāve found reference to it on, but the golden trisection supposedly fulfills for dividing into three unequal parts some of the properties the golden ratio does for dividing into two unequal partsā¦ thereās also the golden qudrisection which can be found in the diagonals of a regular enneagon, but if memory serves, that isnāt supposedly proven to be a unique solution))ā¦ I also like building with construction toys, particularly Zome Tool and Polydron.
Congratulations on your graduation!
Welcome to the Forum. Tons of recommendations, competition discussions, and talk about classics and favourites await.
2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Using Discourse - how it āworksā
Welcome to IF. Check out the IF wiki for info on all int-fic topics, I found it to be a great starting point to re-familiarize myself with the current if-scene after many years of haitus.
Hello, again. I am not sure if I ever posted to this thread or not. Back in the day of rec.arts.int-fiction between the years of 1991-ish to 1998-ish (apologies for having no inclination to actually look this up) I was a lurker/poster/participant in the IF community. I was never a major contributor, but I did participate as a judge in several of the IF-compās and even got a couple of the T-shirts and donated a few prizes a few times.
Before that back in the 1980ās I was an avid fan of the Infocom games, with ZORK 1 being my second computer game purchase for my first home computer, an IBM PCjr (yeah, my parents thought IBM was the bomb). The first game was Sir-Techās Wizardry! - I love RPGās even more than I love interactive fiction. But I loved Infocom, and played many of their games, including Zork 1-3, Enchanter, Hitchhikerās Guide to the Galaxy (and then I read the book, which was even better than the game), and a handful of others.
Even before that, in the mid to late 1970ās, I remember playing text adventures, most probably the Colossal Caves, on the PLATO mainframe system at the University of Illinois in Champaign, IL, where I attended a computer summer camp as a 4th or 5th grader. I remember they even had a multi-user D&D-esque game back then. This was before Apple IIc revolutionized computing by bringing it to the home. Even way back then I was super-interested in computers and writing games.
Before I went to college, I even wrote several super-cheesy BASIC text adventures, which unfortunately have been lost to time. These were not amazing works of fiction or gaming, but they were small exploratory ones like a haunted house with some very minor puzzles and a really terrible parser. I eventually graduated with a computer science degree and got a job writing business software (first in finance, then later in the petrochemical transportation industry).
But as I got older, got kids, got promoted at work, got super busy, I got less time for my hobbies, and interactive fiction got dropped. Heck, I even quit D&D for a while, and that was, like, my main bag. I quit participating in the IF-comp. I quit pretending to have time to learn Inform and write IF. I grew old, cold, and my heart turned to stone.
But then I ended up retiring early recently. And I feel a need to once again embrace the hobbies of my misspent youth. And of course, one of them is interactive fiction. So here I am. Iām back. Lock up your parsers.
I think the first thing I want to do is work through some examples in Inform 7 (I did install this a few times before when I was too busy to really do anything with it, but this time, I actually have time to learn it). I also want to go back and play some of the IF-comp games I missed. And I want to try to participate in the community. Any and all links and advice are appreciated.
Youāve probably seen the big Inform 7 documentation and resources post, but just in caseā¦
Welcome back!
My advice is: Dive in! I learned the basics of Inform without any computer background at all, so it should be smooth sailing for you. And ask, ask, ask for help here. The cornucopia of help overflows in this place.
And you are in for a real treat with the amount of great games since your active period. A great place to start would be playing some games in the Free IF Playoffs going on now, where the top-rated games on IFdB are randomly paired and we vote on our favorite of each matchup. Round 1, Division 1 just ended, and Round 1, Division 2 is going on right now. Itās a great way to play excellent games and start posting about them in those threads.
Welcome!
Be sure to let us know if you want recommendations for fantasy IF or puzzly IF. There are some great ones out there.
Welcome!
I have so many fond memories of the Nintendo and Super Nintendo. For years now I have been kicking around an idea for an interactive fiction work that would in some ways be a nod to the eight-bit era of gaming.
As for mathematics, I once thought that my disability meant I could never be a math person, but in recent years I have come around to embracing the part of me that has always been drawn to math.
I hope the forum is kind enough to you that you can stick around. I now have learning about the golden trisection on my to-do list, and I would love to have some more mathematical rabbit holes to jump down.
Welcome to IntFiction! I am looking forward to your participation and IF games you publish.
I also have very low vision. Between ZoomText and a giant screen, I get around here with no problem.
Welcome!
If you have not already checked it out, Aaron Reedās 50 Years of Text Games is a great way to bring yourself up to speed on quite a few of the watershed moments in the medium.
Yeah, Iāve mostly been using the Latest page, but it seems like thereās no way to really tell where the end of topics with new replies since my last visit is, so I either have to just go until I get tired or the last post date if further back than my last visit. Another annoyance Iāve just notice, but the forum seems to steal ctrl+f when I try to search the text of a topic using Firefoxās find in page functionality. Though Home and End seem to just jump to the beginning and end of the current line as they would on any websiteā¦ Kind of tempted to check what would happen if I tried visiting the forum after going into about:config and setting javascript.enabled to false.
Forgot to mention, but in case 42 making my list of favorite Integers didnāt give it away, but Iām a fan of the Hitchhikerās Guide to the Galaxyā¦ I read the first four books in Highschool, own and read the Ultimate Guide Omnibus prior to going blind, picked up a CD box set of the Primary through Quintessential phases of the Radio Show after going blind, Saw the movie in theaters, and have never survived the destruction of Earth in the Infocom Game, though the game did lead to me learning what an analgesic is. All I know about the Television show is that it exists and being pretty sure both the Radio and Television versions are BBC productions.
And I do like me a good mathematical rabbit holeā¦ though sadly, I canāt often explore them as well as Iād like, what with screen readers and any kind of graphic arts software mixing about as well as oil and water and there being only so much one can do with any particular construction toy(I absolutely love polydron and Zome tool, but they have their limitations. Sadly, all Google can find on the Golden Trisection is an article on a website called Sacred Geometry and a Penterest post persumably by the same person as the websiteā¦ doesnāt stop me from wanting a rectangular prism, ellipsoid, and distorted octahedron with Golden Trisection as their aspect ratio. to add to my collection of math trinkets. Besides, diagonals of a regular polygon are involved, the heptagon is the first regular polygon not constructible with compass and straight-edge, and they are the first regular polygon diagonals outside the āNumbers famous for being famousā club(The triangle has no diagonals, the diagonal of the square is square root 2, the diagonal of the Pentagon is the Golden ratio, and the diagonals of a hexagon are square root 3 and 2)ā¦ plus, they are the first diagonals of a regular polygon without an exact representation with just the 4 basic functions and square rootsā¦ though, on a related note, you can calculate the shortest diagonal of any regular polygon with unit edge length by
sqrt(2 - 2cos(theta))
Where theta is the internal angle of the polygon. This result is derived from the law of cosines by taking the triangle formed by two adjacent edges and a shortest diagonal and simplifying since the edges are unit lengthā¦ Sadly, I know no general means of calculating other diagonals.
That is a very helpful post, thank you for pointing it out!
This is very cool, thank you for the link. Already jumping back in and enjoying it. Plus it gave me a chance to try some of the improved clients. So far I am loving Gargoyle for Windows.
Wow, that looks really nice. I remember when this was on Kickstarter; I backed a lot of RPG-related stuff there from 2016 to 2022 or so. Unfortunately, I am in a bit of a financial crisis right now, so it will have to remain on my wishlist. Thank you for the link. I am quite interested in it, and I will probably try to sell a board game or something so I can snag a digital copy.
I can so relate. Fortunately, the electronic versions of the articles are still there to be read in their entirety.