It's a well known fact from people that know me that I just cannot stand jRPGs anymore thanks to the millions of mediocre games churned out by RPGMaker, Squeenix or whoever, and as such I'm always on the lookout for something new to toy with. I was playing the beautiful gem of a game 'Varicella' recently, and it led me on a quest to find if there was any decent Interactive Fiction gamer makers out there - for people like me who know about as much about coding as Bush knows about politics. It wasn't long before I stumbled upon Inform, which seems to tick all my boxes and leave me giggling like an 6 year old schoolgirl that's just got a new barbie doll.

But Mr Sarevok, I hear you crying, what IS an interactive fiction? Why it's probably the greatest genre of games that exist right now! There's no graphics, rarely music and even more rarely sound effects in these games and they play out just like an..interactive..fiction..novel. Now I realise that a game that comprises entirely of reading and *gasp* THINKING will not suit all the trigger-happy reflex junkies out there, but hey you guys aren't allowed opinions so I won't lose sleep over it. For the rest of us finding a good interactive fiction is what keeps us ploughing on through each day. That Trogdor text game with all the 'get ye flask' hype was an IF, and you know you loved that game so give don't dismiss this too quick.



Inform's beauty lies in the simplicity of the 'programming language' within it. Instead of having to type everything in machine code and hope you didn't type 01011011 instead of 01010011, you just type in basic english and the program does the rest for you. 'Dining Room is a room. John is in the dining room. John is a man.' creates a room called Dining Room, with a guy called John in it - it really is that simple. At first the complexity of all the different things required to make a game may seem a little overwhelming, but the manual built into the program is fantastic, and takes you step-by-step through all the processes needed to create your own masterpiece, including examples of how to put together all the different actions and stuff. Within 10 minutes you'll be able to make rooms and objects, and within a few hours you'll know enough to make a simple game.

Furthermore there's all sorts of features built in for the author to make writing a game as easy as possible, such as an auto-index of every single item and location in the game so you can find things quickly when you run the game, and a 'map' that is generated showing how all your rooms link together. There's even a nifty feature called the 'Skein' that remembers every single action you take when testing your game, and allows you to 'lock' those actions into the Skein so that if you add more to your game, you can just hit one of the actions along it and it will perform every single action prior to that automatically. Good for people adding content to large games and wanting to test if it works. It is, of course, branching so it remembers different actions performed at the same time on different test runs. There's also a 'Transcript' of your game included where you can 'bless' every single description of a location and object into Inform. On subsequent tests of your game the Transcript will compare the descriptions of everything to the 'blessed' descriptions, and if there's a difference will flash red and point you to it - great for testing if a command breaks anything in large games.

There's just not enough people making IF games anymore but the genre is starting to regain popularity again as more and more people get bored with the endless steam of Sims expansions pumped out by EA, so give Inform a whirl and lets get some games from the community that aren't FF fangames for once eh?

http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Welcome.html
Inform mainsite.




And yes, if you want to include 16 year old guys with giant swords and ridiculous haircuts rescuing princesses from demon-possessed trees you can do that too.