Some last thoughts
I first looked into Inform back in the mid-nineties. While I’m not sure of the date, it mostly seemed like a project for reverse engineering Infocom’s Z-machine. This perception was not completely accurate, but it interested me as someone who had been searching Usenet for discussions about Infocom games.
I spent some time trying to learn it, but those efforts never amounted to much. As even casual non-players of my work probably know, half of my first game Repeat the Ending is about a mentally ill author who released a laughably buggy game in 1996.
In fact, a lot of Repeat the Ending is about making things of things, about being a creator, and about all the risks that creation involves. I like Inform because it has helped me make things that I like making, and, like one of the main characters in RTE, I like Inform now because it empowers me to make things that I could not have made in the 1990s.
Often, when I sit down to write about making interactive fiction, I am thinking about someone like me, perhaps a frustrated creative type, for whom tools may have often felt out of reach. I have a lot of affection for Inform as a thing that enabled me to do something I might not have ever done otherwise. Of course, nowadays we have tools that allow us to do things without ever having done them, but I’m grateful that I learned Inform in a time when that wasn’t possible.
I learned a lot through this process. It’s a bit like the concept of slow play, isn’t it? Read, digest every line, pause and reflect. I think others like me could learn a lot from this text, if their minds work a bit like mine does. I’ve shared my sources when possible, and additionally relied on the good people here who, over the years, have taken the time to either ask or explain when something required clarification or discussion. No large language models were consulted in the creation of this text.
I think I liked best the fact that almost everything authors type is codified here: so much more is accounted for than I would have guessed. My greatest pang is the feeling----right or wrong—that some things that could have been handled in natural language were simply i6 inclusions with natural language names. I recognize that, should one dig deep enough, the shovel is going to hit i6 eventually, but it feels very close to the surface at times. Perhaps this is inevitable!
I’m grateful to those of you who read along. This is a heavily-read thread, and, even accounting for scrapers that will repurpose my efforts—with or without crediting me—I still know that there are a lot of you out there. Thanks for coming along! I hope this has helped you in some way. This forum is a great place for learning about Inform. Thanks also to those who participated here, have answered other people’s questions here, have written any kind of documentation for Inform. I’ve used Zed Lopez’s published version of the documentation, and I’m very grateful for it. EDIT: Thanks also to @Dannii , who suggested taking on Basic Inform in the first place, and for hosting permanent versions of the files used here! I’m also grateful to Graham Nelson and everyone else involved in the creation and maintenance of Inform and its documentation.
Because I’m always affected by whatever I’m taking in at the time, my current work in progress has a lot of elements, coding-wise, that it definitely would not have had otherwise. Hopefully I have not overengineered things! Whatever the case might be, there are a lot of Inform features discussed here that practicing authors can pick up and use straight away.
By coincidence, IF Comp starts this week. Since Repeat the Ending was about a first-time author, I want to thank and congratulate all new authors entering. Best of luck to you, and congratulations on finishing your first game. As I’ve said a few times over the years: IF is cool. Making things is cool. You are a cool person.
Thanks again, everybody.
-d