Blog Post 5

My basic plan for the subject matter and theme varied at the beginning of creating my interactive fiction. At first, I wanted the player to have to do puzzles and find clues that led to the ultimate ending, but I found myself changing the plot time after time. This was in order to excuse my poor computer programming skills. My basic plan at the end of it was to have the player use compass directions to find clues that led them outside, to where a stranger resides. There is a diamond ring missing and the stranger wants it, and the player must figure out how to get outside (and figure out that they must go outside in the first place). As I said before, I hoped to incorporate plenty of puzzles that would make the plot all the more interesting. However, this was not achievable, again due to my amateur Inform 7 skills.

I began by reading the documentation on Inform 7, and creating a few rooms and things to lay a foundation for my plot. I basically just copied examples, and then applied them to my story; this is something I did throughout my experience with Inform 7 that made it all the more easy to understand after a while.

I experimented with compass directions constantly, trying to make one-way connections and correlate the directions I gave the reader with the actual compass directions. It was extremely hard at first, and I got very frustrated with it.

I then added more rooms, and started to add descriptions as I got further into the Inform 7 documentation. Many creative opportunities were opened up to me; I could make a description about every object and room that I created. I began to develop my plot from here, now that I had a bit of a handle on what I was doing. I tried to make it like a mystery short story, but that did not work out. This is because of reasons I will discuss later. Mrs. Goodman is having you over for a cup of tea and you must investigate the rooms because there is a diamond ring in her Master Bedroom and a CRASH! in the Living Room. This was what I originally started with. I also placed (along with the diamond ring in the Master Bedroom) a note in the Bathroom with a description.

There were multiple times that I came up with this error message, which must have annoyed me for a solid hour or two. I could NOT find the "If...then" directions, and at this point I turned to the official Inform 7 Handbook, which was available online. The Inform 7 Handbook helped me in many ways, as well as taught me many things that the Inform 7 documentation could not.

I began to get very excited about the possibilities of my interactive fiction once I began reading into the I7 Handbook. I started to understand how to craft things, but I was still stuck at the point. This is where I was trying to get something different to happen the second time the player enters the room or does something. Even after consulting the Handbook, it wasn't possible for me to find a really good description of how to do this. This made me feel extremely limited about my plot, because a giant part of the plot was finding Mrs. Goodman dead on the floor. I also put a joke or two in, just because I knew how to. For example, if one were to try and take the money, it would reply "Why don't you go investigate the noise?"

I realized that maybe the key to getting the if...then action to work was to use "instead" instead. This, however did not work. I kept getting error messages, and having no idea how to interpret them, I would ignore them and go back to the Handbook. I felt at this point that I would not be able to create a short story to my liking, however inspired that I was.

I actually had a friend volunteer to play. This screenshot shows that they were not able to navigate as well as I had wished. They just kept going back and forth, eventually giving up on the game. This is how I felt at the time; I did not want to keep going although I had already begun to get the drift of Inform 7. I thoroughly enjoyed that someone was able to play a game that I had programmed, however, and was inspired to get back to it.

After another hour or so of reading the Inform 7 handbook, I definitely had a good idea of how I was going to put my idea into the program. I used examples from the Handbook, and implemented my own actions into them; after this I was able to do it on my own. For example, I got the "instead" to work. I found that I had to define every little thing if I were to use "instead."

I was ecstatic when I got the door to open. This took tedious work, referring to the Handbook every few seconds. I also began to craft an NPC character, the Stranger, who I actually figured out how to interact with. I figured that after so many hours of work, that I should probably wrap up the story, so I consulted the I7 Handbook for how to end a game. It gave a perfect and clear explanation; however, I wanted to be able to hit the Stranger with something and not just end the game in death.
This is the transcript of me trying to give the stranger things. What comes after this is me trying to hit the stranger with objects in the player's inventory, such as the hammer. I was able to have a small conversation with my NPC, which I thought was necessary but no more conversation was needed (I didn't want to do more coding for the talking). The coding was hard to do for my NPC; not just the talking but any other action as well. I had to define each and every verb. I must say that my muse was severely limited in that I was not able to kill my character the way that I wanted to.

I took more and more examples from the Handbook, and kept applying them. This worked so well that I was able to finish the game by myself. I got bored by the ending having already been completed so I decided to add more detail to the NPC stranger. I gave him a description and finished up on how I would be able to allow the player to hit the stranger with the hammer.

This is the first ending to my interactive fiction. I was able to take the hammer and hit the stranger with it (although it's not shown in screenshots), and I was able to finish the game by giving the stranger the ring. I felt accomplished at this point, because everything had led up to the ending very well because of my going back and refining the coding every couple seconds.
I ended up with 5 rooms and 7 things, which was pretty impressive to me due to my complete inability to use Inform 7 in the first couple of hours of playing around with it. In general, I enjoyed my experience with I7. It made me more inspired to craft my own story, and it made me happy to see others able to interact with something that I did. I was more apt to program my short story, I think, than rather to sit down and write it. And I was very content with the outcome!