I made a tiny mini-game with Inform in the last 24 hours to see if I could understand the game. Would anyone be willing to browse through it (about 10 minutes long) and give me advice on implementation?
There’s no real story; I was just trying to implement:
NPCs with a variety of ASK keywords;
an animal with random actions;
a searchable item;
changing standard responses;
and some few references to Colossal Cave Adventure.
I’m looking for someone to play through and suggest things that should have been implemented (i.e. if important objects or characters have no descriptions). I’d like to eventually build a full game, but I’m trying to start small. Simple Things.gblorb (614 KB)
I’m not sure what advice to give, since it doesn’t sound like you’re planning to develop this particular scenario into a full game? But in general, adding descriptions for everything and implementing every noun which is mentioned in the room description tends to be appreciated. Also, having verbs take non-standard meanings can be confusing (“GET BEAR” meaning “tell the bear to follow me”, for example), unless it’s hinted somehow that that’ll happen. I attached a short transcript of just messing around in the world a bit so you can see the things I tried to do and what I ran into. simple.txt (5.04 KB)
Thanks! This is exactly what I was looking for. There are some gloves in the scree that can get you up the cliff. But already you’ve given me an idea of what kind of commands to implement.