vivdunstan

Thought about reusing some old LPC MUD code - dated 1992! - in a puzzle in my latest interactive fiction game that I'm writing. Then looked at the LPC code and thought "Way too complicated for what I need here!" So I'm going simpler. But it is nice to revisit.

I was a wizard in the St Andrews University MUD back then, as was Martin. I also played through to wizard level on a Glasgow MUD at the same time. Many happy memories.

Reading Jason Dyer's recent blog posts playing interactive fiction text adventure game Fairytale (1982). And my mind is blown at the start, learning that this game is based on Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree series of books. Which I adored when I was very young.

I say "based on", but Enid Blyton's books are only part of the inspiration for the game. But the game *does* have her Faraway Tree, and Moonface, Saucepan Man and the Slippery Slip. No Silky though, or Dame Slap.

Back to game coding, working on another chapter of my latest interactive fiction parser game. Coded probably the only door+keys combo in the game. Added a couple of "test X" shortcut commands. Love Inform, the natural language / object oriented / declarative programming language for IF parser games.

This is all partly inspired by having played through, judged and reviewed loads of IFComp interactive fiction games in recent weeks. And it's that time of year (my favourite!) when I'm keen to work on new projects. Or in this case pick up an old one! I hope to enter this game in IFComp 2026.

The IF community is in an existential crisis over the use of generative AI in interactive fiction games, and particularly its use in creative competitions such as IFComp. Here's a good writeup from one of multiple people who've been deterred from participating in IFComp this year, even as a player and judge. https://azhdarchid.com/slop-comes-for-everything-you-love/

I'm opposed to the use of generative AI in creative competitions in general. Partly on philosophical and fairness grounds, but also ethical and environmental reasons. I'm judging IFComp yet again this year - I've been doing this since it started in 1995 - and this year's genAI content is depressing.

Getting beyond exasperated with the number of people on forums and groups I'm on, who reply to questions, needing specialist and reliable knowledge to answer, and post a response from ChatGPT. Usually & consistently wrong. Those folk may learn it's not a good source but others later will use it too.

I'm also beyond exasperated by the misuse of generative AI in creative fields, including art, interactive fiction and writing. I'm also an academic whose own academic writings have been used without my permission to train AI, including for Meta. And then there are the environmental costs. Just stop!

My 88-year-old Mum who's never used a computer or smartphone in her life, and never will, also rants about AI. I'm quite impressed that she knows about it and has enough knowledge to have opinions :)

Incidentally I've been using and involved with some forms of AI since the 1980s. But I really really dislike the modern version and where things are going with it.

Another casualty of the UK Online Safety Act: all interactive fiction (including traditional parser text adventures) games stored at http://ifarchive.org are currently geoblocked to UK users. The IFTF folks are trying to work out a solution, but there is no current clue to how long that might take. The archive holds 30+ years worth of generally amateur/free IF games - a vast number. Including my own. Which I can't play online right now. Not that I want to, but it's rather ironic! Meanwhile the intfiction forum where this might usually be discussed is still down 36 hours later, after a Linode cloud server outage.

And IFComp is also likely to be affected, including the next competition opening for judging in just over a month. IFTF folk are currently urgently reviewing that. I wonder if I'll be able to play *any* IFComp games this year.

From our local bookshop, and a rare books seller in East Lothian.

I already have a fuller more original Scots play script for the 16th century play. But hoped that the slightly modernised/simplified version might be more suitable for my needs (including IF game design ...). Martin borrowed it for me from the uni library last week, and after a quick peek to be sure it was what I needed I could then confidently buy my own copy for longer-term use.

I love the Alice books. And collect playing cards. This is a new (last week) release of this deck. Plus a bonus fun book. We couldn't pick them up in person from the local bookshop on Friday - they needed to be ordered in. So I got them delivered, and they arrived in the post today.

Had a very disturbed night neurologically last night, but on plus spent some very useful time building up some overview boards in Milanote of my next IF game (interactive fiction, in this case parser text adventure). Here's a snippet, hopefully blurred out enough in appropriate places! This is a board showing the 7 chapters side by side, with overview info of each, helping me balance things, as well as links to more detailed boards for each individual chapter. To be honest this is all rather advanced procrastination, when I really just need to get on with writing and coding up more game sections! But it is helping me see the balance, and through structure, and also helping highlight areas where I need to develop things more deeply or in differently connected ways. Milanote has a rather costly subscription model after you've used up the free allowance. But I'm currently finding it useful for brainstorming and developing. It's like having nested digital white boards. And syncs well across web, Mac, iOS and Android. I previously created mood boards in Milanote for both Bad Beer (my previous game) and this new game. But this is my first go properly planning and overviewing with it.

Inform 7 source code for my IFComp game "Bad Beer" is now freely available in the IFArchive. It is also linked from Bad Beer's IFDB game web page. April 1 is Source Code Amnesty Day for interactive fiction games. More info about my release in my intfiction forum post.

Pleased to manage some more interactive fiction game coding, now developing chapter 6 of 7 in my next parser text adventure game. Not developing in sequential order! Currently flitting to and fro between coding in Inform 7 and researching a topic. While also trying to visualise the scene in my brain!

Inform 7 is a magical system to code interactive fiction games in. But it's also brilliant how you can quickly test things even just to improve writing. I've just coded another test command "test X" to jump to the latest code. I can't say what X is - spoilers. But I'm very happy typing that command!