Cool, I found your Tales from Alphabet City on Itch.io. Pretty radical art style and of course, 80’s punk subculture is a fascinating topic. I will definitely check it out. Welcome to the board!
-virtuadept
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Feel free to share works you’ve done, and welcome to the board!
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Yes, I tried out your build for ADL for Windows, great work. It was fun to play around with it. I haven’t tried writing an actual adventure with it, but I am curious to locate other ADL source code if you know of others to try to build and see what it does.
I actually think learning Inform might be easier than programming a complex game in ADL, based on a couple of reasons…
Firstly, Inform 7 is pretty close to a “natural language” programming language. There’s a bit of syntax and behavior based on where / how you lay out the “source code” but it definitely reads like plain English text. So it’s not too terribly hard to learn. After about 30 to 90 minutes of time with the tutorials I bet you could develop games far more complex than any of the ADL examples. I’d like to see some large ADL games to know for sure.
Secondly, Inform 7 also has a large community of developers that have released importable libraries that model a ton of complex behavior for you without having to add a ton of code to your game’s source yourself. The community library is built right into the Inform 7 IDE. Just search and add libraries to your projects by checking a box [note: this works on the latest Windows version; I do not have a Mac, so I am not sure if it has that integration on Mac].
Another big advantage for Inform 7 is that most computing platforms can play games written with it (it can output Z-machine files like Infocom used, as well as other more feature-robust formats that came out later). I know you can play Inform games on iOS, Mac, Windows, Android, Linux, and quite a few other platforms. Depending on the format you output to there’s probably even an Amiga interpreter for it. Bigger, more complex games require using the Glulx format, and that would change which platforms can be used to play it. But it’s a lot.
So, that’s my pitch for Inform 7. I also think, ultimately, you should use whatever you want to use. I do, however, strongly believe that your choice of authoring tool has a major impact on the potential audience of your work.
-virtuadept
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Cool, welcome to the community, Naarel! I took a quick look at Convergence, looks like it could be very interesting. Dreaming, and lucid dreaming especially, has always been a curious obsession of mine.
-virtuadept
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Heya! My name’s simon.
I’m a game programmer by trade, first getting into playing games with ones like zork and the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy ( there was a book first? who knew! ) - then the sierra games, and ultima. And always trying to figure out how they were made.
I’m still a big fan of story based games and IF. And still fascinated with the tools, and how people use them to put stories together. ( I’ve written one small point and click game myself – on itch.io – and i’ve been working on an IF engine, somewhat modeled after Inform, called “Tapestry”, that’s probably still not quite ready for real use, but it’s slowly getting there. )
I thought i’d join to find some cool stories to play, and just generally see what people are up to. I love that there’s such a strong community making IF games, and so it’s cool to be here.
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Hello. I’m not a programmer, though I have coded some things in days of yore, best forgotten.
What I am is a player: I have been typing GET LAMP for more than 40 years now. Played and solved thousands of adventures and adjacent genres over the long years in almost all platforms, and managed to assemble a sizable, personal hoard of solutions and maps, many of which have never seen the light of day. Slowly, in my autumn days, I’m revisiting old games, correcting solutions, crafting better cartography with better tools, and publishing my materials (mainly at CASA). Also discovering new games as well and doing what I can about them. It never ends. I’m glad to see the community still cares.
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It really is pretty awesome with amazing people. Welcome to the community! I will check out your links.
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First let me say welcome to the community! Sounds like you are an old school adventure gamer who is finding your way here to the modern interactive fiction community, much like myself. The community really needs players like you to review and comment about your experiences playing the games. Please see the recent posts about the Review-a-thon initiative and check out IFDB for a great place to capture your reviews or solutions to games.
-virtuadep
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It’s been seven-and-a-half years since I finished my BS in CS and I never really had the opportunity to take any interesting electives, but it’s not surprising at all to me that tech savvy folks are among the strongest skeptics of what current AI models are capable of. After all, I’d argue the thing ChatGPT and its ilk are best at is looking smart to the within 1 standard deviation of mean IQ crowd who can’t tell when the AI is making stuff up while domain experts can usually see through the bullshit when it’s their own area of expertise and can extrapolate well enough to be suspicous of smart sounding output they can’t personally verify.
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Hi, call me flower, im super duper new to IF, but i would love to talk to you all
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Hi flower and welcome!
Do you have played IF already? Which one? And do you have preferences (like Fantasy, detective games, etc.)?
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I generally love IF that play with it’s medium, also idk if its IF, but I love 17776
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I think it’s not IF because Wikipedia says it’s a multimedia game. But I think it’s a brother or sister of IF because it is a narrative game.
Generally thinking about eternal life scares me…
An IF that plays with or extends the usual technology is Counterfeight Monkey.
Oh yeah i love it a lot too
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We primarily deal with IF where the story and interactions are word-based (clicking text links or typing commands) but there are all sorts of hybrid games that do more than that and we discuss them. A lot of conventions from choice-narratives and parser IF often are internal elements of bigger graphical games, such as conversation trees in RPGs, or something like What Remains of Edith Finch which is heavily narrative-story and exploration-based, and I’ve always considered that as an example of how something with the depth of parser IF might be conveyed in graphical format.
We generally try not to argue “What is IF” in an exclusionary manner since we can learn a lot from games that utilize IF elements. There are games that would otherwise be IF but have mainstream success often due to inclusion of non-textual content - often as interface such as 80 Days which is at it’s core a QBN choice-narrative in Ink, but utilizes graphics for navigation similar to a board game. Other mainstream games like Monster Prom and Visual Novels have major roots in IF in that they are very text/choice-based despite the inclusion of graphical elements. Other games pay homage to classic IF like Stories Untold - specifically the “The House Abandon” chapter. We even have discussed Netflix’s Bandersnatch which was a high-profile attempt at video/television choice narrative.
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Im so invested in it
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Welcome to the community, Flower! The community can always use more reviewers, beta testers, and of course, just players. Please check out other IF related websites that are closely associated with intfiction.org:
ifwiki.org - great place to find resources like web pages that promote IF, games, interpreters that run games on various platforms, authoring systems, and more.
IFDB.org - huge database of interactive fiction games, reviews of games, links to other resources, etc. Many games on here are playable in your browser, also.
ParserComp on itch.io - Currently voting is open for this competition of free interactive fiction that uses parsers to process player input. Itch.io is another huge online store/database of interactive fiction games, a lot of free ones, a few that are for pay.
ifcomp.org - Homepage of the annual interactive fiction competition, register here to vote in the largest comp of the year, coming soon!
I could go on but these have links to a lot of other places so that is probably more than enough to get you started. Look forward to conversing with you about specific games or other topics. Again, welcome!
-virtuadept
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Oh, just noticed this thread. Hi everyone!
I’m an enthusiast of interactive fiction and a bit of a coder. I’m excited to join this community and share my love for storytelling.
I look forward to contributing, learning from you all, and maybe even helping with some coding issues.
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Welcome to the group, PythonRonin! What would you say was the greatest influence on you that contributed to exploring your interests in interactive fiction?
Thank you for the warm welcome! My first and greatest influence in exploring interactive fiction was actually discovering choose-your-own-adventure books in childhood 
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