Greetings!
After I finish and publish my current Squiffy project, I’m considering to take the plunge and learn Inform 7.
What would be your advice on learning Inform 7, such as incremental projects or tutorials?
Probably not the best place to ask this, but: what about learning Inform 7 in spanish? I’ll probably write my first work in this my native tongue… unless it’s too daunting and decide to first try my hand on an english adventure.
I await your kind input.
First: the Inform 7 documentation is quite good. The application itself comes with two books, Writing with Inform and The Inform Recipe Book. WI takes you step by step through the major features of the language, starting with easy things and moving up to very complex topics. The RB gives you four or five hundred different examples of various things that you would actually want to do in a game, along with code you’re free to use that implements those ideas: for instance, it has a door that can be locked from one side without a key (#24), or realistically overlapping layers of clothes (#46), or a kind of container that always has a lid that also functions as a supporter (#58), or smoke spreading throughout the rooms of a map (#74), or NPCs who will follow directions (#184-190), or a whole game in which a disease spreads from one NPC to another (#402), so there’s a huge variety of sample code to look at while you’re working through WI topic by topic, and it’s readable on its own, and is constantly a useful reference.
That being said, “quite good” or not, no approach is right for everybody, and Jim Aiken’s Inform 7 Handbook is a free online resource that takes more of a jump-in-and-get-started approach, and if the systematic introduction of ordered, increasingly advanced topics in WI strikes you as dry, that might be a good place to start instead.
Aaron’ Reed’s Writing with Inform is a very good book, not available freely online, and no longer in print. Used copies have the reputation of being horrifically expensive amongst people who only check Amazon and think that’s a fair index of its price everywhere, but the truth that you can generally find a less-expensive copy if you hunt around.
Good luck with your current and your upcoming projects!
Also there was an Inform 7 Bootcamp in connection with NarraScope: it was intended to be sort of a direct class thing so the sessions weren’t recorded, but the tutorials are available, and are quite nice, I thought.
I would like to add that Aaron Reed’s text is readily available in a Kindle version for a reasonable cost. I highly recommend Reed’s text.
Only in some parts of the world. Eg as a UK customer I can’t buy a kindle version from Amazon UK. It is available from Amazon US but my kindle account is tied to the UK store.
Luckily I managed to nab a fairly low cost secondhand print copy.
Thanks to everyone for your kind and thorough advice.
En caso que alguien hispanoparlante lea esto y sea habitual de este foro, me gustaría saber qué recomiendan para aprender Inform 7 en español: preguntaré también en el foro del CAAD, pero, ya saben, hay que ser exhaustivo y no excluyente 
