IFComp game progress

[vivdunstan]

Charging ahead with IFComp game coding. Helped last night by realising I could reuse some code from a past game. Though it's less essential to this game than that one it is helpful to have here. Still finding Inform 7 ridiculously fun to code in, and scarily close to magic when things work.

I've much to do, but am getting the core through line in place. Plus building lots of essential framework. Huge leaps forward in the last couple of days. And I can see where to go next. Lots to do, which is good.

Comments

[andrewducker]

That does look fun to code in!

[vivdunstan]

It's wonderful! Martin is really jealous of me, given the programming systems he works with every day in his job. The example above is a bit more imperative than much Inform source code. Which is - at least in the Inform 7 / 10 later version - a curious mix of declarative natural language and object oriented. It does feel like writing in Prolog a lot of the time. But also not like coding given the natural language syntax. And the way you code it in the IDE and play through to see if it's working, tweak, then play again does feel like you're constantly playing fun games.

The Inform website has lots of info about the system at https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ but it's almost too much to take in.

You might find it easier to look at some source code. This is long, but a quick flick through shows lots of the key elements. This is from my competition game some years ago, a 16th century historical mystery.

http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/source/inform/NapiersCache.txt

The game itself can be played online at https://iplayif.com/?story=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.springthing.net%2F2020%2Fplay_online%2FNapiersCache%2FNapiersCache.gblorb and there is also a download version available to play in an offline interpreter. See https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=4np21bl7mr02wsk2