I’ll try not to annoy folks every time this happens but I got asked to teach another coding/game design class where we used Inform 7. This time around it was three large classes of grade school children, some of which couldn’t even read (which was a challenge but we got through it)! In the end probably 80% had a simple workable game and we did the “shift over and play your neighbor’s game” thing on the last day and it was so heartwarming to hear all the excitement and laughter (many had injected a lot of humor into their work).
It’s so amazing that you can do ANYTHING in IF. Want to FLARGLE THE BLORP? No problem! It’s such a wonderful relief from real life, where flargling blorps would be met with puzzlement and probably disapproval (considering what I think that action does in the game).
I’m not quite to flargling blorps but as I get deeper into the game and want to distinguish things the descriptors get weirder and weirder. I always think “there’s no way I’ll forget what that is all about” and then realize that, yes I will, and have. More than once I’ve come back to my own code and been bewildered by the choices of the maniac that coded it.
I was stunned at the first encounter of a student not knowing how to read. After my heart resumed beating, I asked, “Can you find the letters on the keyboard that you see on the Power Point?” And from there- I think given their eagerness to make a game- they stumbled through it. Motivation is everything, even for me!!!
Yes, the school agreed that next time we’ll try to lean on the older kids and give the younger maybe just a analog game design class, .i.e board games, RPG, etc.
Write your code/documentation such that it’s clear what it’s meant to do and how it accomplishes it even to someone who doesn’t know anything about it… because in six months that person will be you.
Program and document as if the person who’ll be maintaining the code is a vengeful homicidal maniac who knows where you live.
If I have one complaint about I7 it’s that I wish there was some way/I knew how to cycle through the built in levels of organization rather than having to ctrl-f every time I wanted to move around.
In the “Source” tab, there should be a “Contents” option at the top. (Or perhaps you already know about this and it’s not what you’re looking for—it’s still far from perfect, unfortunately.)
Inform 7’s greatest strength is its readability. It’s why I’m always pushing to word things in a way that sounds as English-like as possible: on the whole, we’re much better at skimming something that looks like English text than we are a block of C code. So making your source look like English makes it easier to come back to later.
I’ve been programming in C for nearly 40 years so…
On occasions my program hasn’t worked, I’ve found a function which, according to the comments, does the wrong thing… then I’ve realised that the code does the right thing; it’s just the comments that are wrong.
Moral: debug the code, not the comments
(Seriously, I’ve often exclaimed WTH while using Inform [sigh]. The language it accepts looks like English but it doesn’t accept most English.)
