a biting cat website
stopping the clock. what usually happens. Time in a parser game is measured in turns. A player types a command, and, if the command is accepted, the game will process it, update the state of the game world, and print feedback. For instance, this little Inform project: lab is a room.the shirt is a wearable […]
Creating or specifying custom adjectives. using adjectives to describe the worlds of our games adjectives in general. In everyday spoken English, we use adjectives to describe and specify nouns. We might refer to a tall building or a lovely song. A bird might be blue or black. Adjectives are frequently discussed in Inform’s Standard rules, […]
ifs, ands, and otherwises reintroductions. Hi all! It’s been a while. At some point, it will probably make sense to work through specific chapters in the documentation. Starting at the beginning would be the most logical approach, so let’s not do that. I’ve been thinking about what Inform calls “phrases” a lot, specifically ones used […]
other ways to repeat through things. refresher. Last time, we talked about repeating through objects and values. In this rather dull example, we ask Inform to list every possible color when color is “a kind of value.” We can just as easily run through objects, specifying kinds or properties along the way. While these tools […]
The loop-de-loop. How do I hold all of these things. Hello, fellow beginners! Sometimes, we need to do something to a number of things or objects all at once. Maybe we’d like to check and see how many things have a property. We might want a list of the location of every thing in the […]
A wild regex appears! Mainframe Blues From a presentation and interface point of view, Inform games emerged from the rarefied world of terminal applications. While terminals might support varied character sets, they are designed to print, one line at a time, unadorned text. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s how Inform games do things, and […]
Hello, fellow authors! I’ve been neck deep in my own work for this year’s Spring Thing festival, which has left me little time for anything else, IF or otherwise. But the submission date has come and gone, and I am once again free to work on my other projects, including Let’s Make IF! You should […]
What is Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight made of? update. It’s been so long since my last post! That’s because I have been trying to get Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight ready for beta testing. It’s turned out to be a big job. The game is far more complex than anything I’ve done […]
what are turns made of? to everything, turn, turn, turn. Last week, a reader commented on my use of a carry out rule. That’s great! I’ve been thinking about it, and decided it’s probably time to review action processing. “Action processing” is a general term referring to order, organization, and outcomes with regard to the […]
With “let’s WRITE IF” concluded, what’s next? spring thing, here we come. As I’ve mentioned here and elsewhere, I have two small games planned for the 2025 Spring. One is Portrait with Wolf. I’ve written a lot about that in the past few months. As of right now, that project is complete from a Top […]