You wrote Sunset over Savannah! One of my absolute favourite games. The meditative mood coupled with some knucklebitingly frustrating puzzles, the magical-realist setting which feels a lot bigger than its actual number of locations, the details like the little crab skittering across the sand in front of your feet and then burrowing back down.
The larger-than-life but still appropriate in-setting response to XYZZY at the right time and place!
I can almost smell the sea and hear the gulls again while writing this. And I swear I still sometimes see the glass ant-castle in my dreams.
I havenāt replayed it in ages but I recently stumbled across Jacquelineās Club Floyd playthrough transcript, and boy, if I could go back, there is a lot of stuff I would love to fix. Sadly I lost the source code many years ago.
Hello all, Iām John. I run a micropress (more like a digital crate out of the back of my digital van) called NO Press. Iāve always loved the old unforgiving IF games despite being no good / too young for them, but Iāve recently come back to them in earnest after becoming a little overloaded on cinematic (āā) gaming.
After recently playing the wonderful Anchorhead, Iāve felt the compulsion to start my own little strange story, based on an old āblue bookā Chronicles of Darkness campaign I played and never forgot. Itās like a Colorado Wicker Manā¦ sort of.
Iām not a total novice to coding, but Iām interested in the specific formal structures / creative constraints of what Anchorhead played with, so Iām using Inform for this. I was hoping I could count on this forum as a kitchen cabinet as I make various mistakes, poor decisions, and overestimations. Pleasure to meet you all!
Hi! My name is Snowy, and Iām new to IF, making and to some degree also playing. A few months ago, some bizarre compulsion led me, someone with very little previous coding experience and even less overall inclination, to download Twine and start teaching myself Harlowe. What started as a spur of the moment 3am impulse seems to be here to stay, as Iāve learned more than I really thought I could and my mind is starting to buzz with ideas for stories I could tell. (Nothing of any particular merit, really, mostly just little bite-sized fan games Iād like to share with my friends.)
I made an account here because googling things I didnāt understand about the coding language led me here more often than not, and while I got a lot of help off of other sites like Reddit this place routinely had some of the best advice broken down in a way that was easy for me to understand as a coding newbie and apply to my project. Iām also hoping to learn a bit more about IF in general. Iāve been writing as a hobby since forever, but Iāve never really tried my hand at anything properly interactive before, so it will be very cool and helpful to see how other people do it.
I have learned that most of my ideas are a bit more RPG-esque than Harlowe is really meant to support. I am going to try and finish the ones Iāve already started in Harlowe, though, both because itās easier for me to understand than Twineās other languages and because I find it very fun to try and make things function just a little to the left of how theyāre supposed to. After I become more comfortable with coding in general and get some JavaScript under my belt I will check out the other languages and tools available.
Itās great to meet everyone! Iām looking forward to participating and learning here!
Yeah, count me in the category of folks who liked that approach to nWoD/CoD - never got a full campaign together but I ran a couple really fun one-shots with it. Actually wrote one of them up as an Actual Play thread, wish I had done more (though this one, set in Articles of Confederation-era Boston, was the best).
Anyway Colorado Wicker Man sounds fun, welcome to the forum!
Hello, my name is Matt Farrow, and some of my stuff goes by the handle of fatmarrow (itās cringe, but Iām stuck with it now). The first IF game I played was Sphinx Adventure on the BBC Micro, circa 1983. I wrote a silly Inform 6 game at university in 1994/5 to tease my friends, but the Inform 6 (or 5?)/Z machine memory limitations stymied my ambitions at the time.
I started writing my own parser a year or two ago while growing disillusioned working on an indie Unreal Engine game (after a late life shift into game dev from being a hobbyist; I am also a patent attorney, but get less excited about that). I quit that job and decided to push on with making an actual game based around my parser, with the intention of making something interesting (to create a visible track record) rather than in the expectation of commercial success (I mean, in case that wasnāt obviousā¦). I will probably say more about my game when my prototype is further developed - but, in brief, it involves text adventure segments accessed within a 3D world. My aim is to make the text adventure bits relatively accessible to newcomers, and to form part of a larger narrative than to be ends in themselves. That is to say, they will be more curated homage to the genre than fiendish/original puzzles. Easier to show than tell, I guess.
Iāve been here a day and already it is clear that there are very many clever authors/programmers and puzzle makers, and Iāve managed to miss about 30 years of the good stuff. Life came at me fast but I am trying to find more time to get back into things. Hopefully I will be able to hang around and get to know all of you and your wonderful things a bit better.
Hi. Iām mathew. I started playing adventure games back on the TRS-80. I wrote my first game in TRS-80 BASIC. It wasnāt good and youāll be relieved to hear itās long lost.
I intended to write more. I started work on a game for the BBC Micro. I got as far as text compression and a full sentence parser in 6502 assembler, but by then 16 bit computers were arriving. I learned the lesson that you can build adventure game engines, or you can write adventure games, but most people donāt have the time to do both. I did, however, find the time to play almost every Level 9 and Infocom game. (I played a few Magnetic Scrolls games but I wasnāt as enamored of those.)
So, fast forward a few decades and I decided to give adventure authoring another try with Inform 7. I started out with a mostly complete reimplementation of Radio Shackās āHaunted Houseā for the TRS-80. Iām now working on a slightly larger and more polished game. If thatās a success Iāve got notes for a couple of full size games which I would plan to make public.
I think my first game experience, other than Pong, was a mining game on a TSR-80 that a friend brought over. Loaded from cassette tapes! Ah, sunrise, sunset. Anyway, hi Matthew!
Another old guy! We had a TRS-80 in our high school computer lab.
This is a good observation. Iāve been working on an engine for nearly six years and I know Iāll have to present a compelling game made with it if I ever want to convince anyone to use it, but it turns out I think I like writing tools more than games.