“Safe” by Benjamin Wochinski

By Ben Wochinski on January 9, 2011


And there we have it, my very first Interactive Fiction game!  It’s nothing terribly special, but I enjoyed creating it and learning I7 in the process.

I’ve just posted the game on the IFDB and I’ll include that link on the game page and here.  I had a great time developing the game, but I have to say, the complexity that I reached in just a couple weeks of work on this game really makes a full-length work look daunting.  Perhaps I did allow myself to go a little overboard on unnecessary detail in this game, but I like that feeling that there’s just a little more to the world than the minimum that I need to see.

At any rate, anyone who’d like to comment (or report bugs that weren’t caught) please feel free!  I at least know that I’ll see comments that get posted here.

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Working in Inform 7

By Ben Wochinski on January 8, 2011

I chose to write in Inform 7 because of the natural language-like syntax.  Of course this has drawbacks when you’re trying to create something more programmatic than descriptive.  Some of the difficulty I had in that may also be attributed to the way actions and events flow when writing interactive fiction as opposed to how they might flow when writing an application.

For my first IF, I chose to write a small escape-style puzzle game, and as I approach completion, I’m glad.  I’ve learned a lot of the workings of I7 already.  The game has several new actions designed for the story, as well as a few objects with special behavior or states that I had to figure out how to implement.

The biggest (and unexpected at the outset) problem I came across was getting the idea of putting things underneath things. After a valiant attempt to do it myself, I settled on the Underside extension by Eric Eve, with a few small tweaks.  It’s not exactly what I was imagining, but it’s more than adequate and implemented far better than what I would have been able to create.

I know a lot of this has been fairly vague, but I should hope to have my game released in the next few days.  After that I’ll probably do a couple posts with code examples from some of the above mentioned cases. I’m sure it will be mainly for my own benefit, but hopefully also for the Inform 7 novice.

And on that note, hopefully I will next be posting on release day for my first IF game!

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Hello Interactive Fiction

By Ben Wochinski on January 7, 2011

Hello!  I’m Ben, and I’m fairly new to Interactive Fiction.  I’ve played a game here and there throughout most of my life actually, but never as a serious hobby.  Lately I’ve become more interested in it again, especially in authoring interactive fiction games.

I jumped onto the Inform 7 platform because the natural language syntax looked very nice.  I do have a moderate programming background, but the descriptive nature of the language I found great for automatically getting into the state of mind to describe the world and events I want to create.

I will post again soon regarding my experience in solving the problems of writing my first game.

So until then…

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