Demon-Killer was my first parser adventure game, written in BASIC on an Apple II+ somewhere in the age 9-12 vicinity (1984-1987). Looking at this is likely easier and more fun than playing the game, even for non-programmers. Programmers should not emulate Demon-Killer lest they reduce their skill levels.
I share it for entertainment purposes, and also as a demonstration for the younger folk of how you can keep working on a form of expression for approximately forty+ years.
Congrats for being the first up to the plate this year! And wow, this reminds me of a bunch of little BASIC games I used to write in middle school - all thankfully lost, since this a model of good design and coding compared to those
@Lancelot See, I already learned some Inform from the One King source. I didn’t know you could erase all commands for an action by saying something like “Understand nothing as opening.” I’ve been going around finding all the verbs leading to the action I wanted to get rid of and blotting them out individually. Like a chump!
Here’s some ZIL code for a game I’m working on… This is just a little, tiny amount of the code, and I’m still working on it. The ocde I’m showing you is the REAL GAME, not any useless side parts. Much of the code inside the file is useless, since you certainly can’t compile it (which obeys the rules of the IFComp). I also deleted lots of the code in the file for this, because if you saw that code, it would ruin the game. Here’s the REAL GAME…
I just posted the full source to my IFComp 2022 entry, You May Not Escape! It’s wild to look back on it and see how different my approach was two years ago (and also how similar!).
I’m not sure if I did everything right, but this should be the source code for Dysfluent:
@Allx wrote most of the Javascript and helped me bend Harlowe to my will it was a great learning experience for the both of us.
I’m eager to share the Inform 7 code for my Spring Thing entry – it’s a total mess, and you can really tell that I was a complete beginner when I started writing it!
I’d like to give people a chance to play the game first, but consider this my pledge to include the source code in its postmortem.
There’s not as much here as I’d like, because I’m dealing with a lot of challenges in my personal life right now. However, it’s Source Code Amnesty Day, so here we are.
Thanks everyone for participating in this year’s event! I think last year we had a lot of Inform, so it’s cool to see a wide variety of systems this time out (though with that said, I actually felt like I might have missed some stuff when I played You May Not Escape so I’m excited to look through the code and see for sure!)
I know I didn’t have anything to bring to the table this year, but hopefully that will change when I see you all back here in 2025!
Last-minute entry: The Inform 7 source code for Beat Witch, which was in 2023 IFComp. It may be of particular interest to those who are curious about how I went about coding the music for traditional interpreters and browsers.
I was busy yesterday, but I’ve now uploaded the source code for my four most-recent games. In addition to the source code, you get the z3 and z5 files, coded hints (for the Dr Dooriddle games), map, Trizbort file for the map, and solution - all at no extra cost.
All are parser-based text adventures written in Inform 6 using the PunyInform library. This brings the total number of my GitHub repositories to 19 (one per game).
For a full list of all my games, see IFDB or my itch.io profile page. All games have full instructions and can be played online at the individual game pages at itch.io.
Looking back at the code, one of the design decisions I’m no longer happy with is in fact how easy it is to miss major things! For such a small game (of all the games I’ve released, YMNE has by far the fewest lines of code—even with all the unnecessary extra line breaks & commented out blocks and rules), it tends to be quite stubborn about its secrets.
Well, this is less than ideal. Does anyone know how to generate nice HTMLified source code with the current version of Inform? It insists on putting it all into a single page instead of breaking it up with my headings, which results in an unreadably long page.
I have a Python script for HTMLifying I7 source: i7-to-html.py
It’s based on the Pygments syntax colorer rather than Inform’s built-in one.
However, it doesn’t break up source by headings. It can add a table-of-contents list of headings at the beginning, with section links, so navigation is reasonably tractable.
EDIT: If you get a TypeError: I7HtmlFormatter.wrap() takes 2 positional arguments but 3 were given, you need to upgrade your version of Pygments. Oops.
Better late than never, here’s the source to Death on the Stormrider! Still working on that post-comp release, but Spring Thing and research work has taken precedence at the moment.
This part might be of particular interest to I7 coders. It adds a “Sound” rulebook, run for actions that aren’t in the player’s immediate vicinity (that’s handled by “Report”) but are close enough to hear. This is how you can keep track of what the crew is up to while you sneak around, sabotaging their ship.
Loose Ends is coming soon…hopefully. So you’ll be able to see just how atrocious my Ink style is. I had a consistent standard for casing at one point, and then…I didn’t.