Johan and I, who are developing PunyInform, can see that several PunyInform games have been released and several more are in progress, but we don’t get very many suggestions for new features.
If you’ve kept an eye on PunyInform, you already know that the goal of the library is to allow authors to create compact and fast Z-code games which can be played on 8-bit computers. Programming a game with PunyInform is very similar to programming with the Inform 6 standard library, but some features of the standard library are missing and some are optional. PunyInform also offers a few features which the standard library doesn’t, and some features are present in both libraries but work differently (most notably directions).
An absolutely minimal PunyInform game is about 22.5 KB in size. That’s about 60% smaller than a minimal game using the standard library. Of course, it wouldn’t be possible to make the code so much smaller and still support all the nice things the standard library provides. What we’re aiming to do is drop things that are bulky and not so essential, and to make things that are really nice to have for some types of games but not all, optional.
Still, we are open to suggestions on what to add to the library. If you’ve written, or started to write, a game with PunyInform, and you’ve found that you had to add features which you think would have been better if they were part of the library, let us know. And we’re thinking that maybe it’s even better to have an open thread for it here, so others can react to the suggestions that pop up.
Things can be added to the library in three ways:
- Core library - it’s always enabled
- Optional - the author needs to define a constant to enable it
- Extension - the author needs to include a file to enable it
And of course, some things we get suggestions for aren’t added at all.