Category Archives: Craft & Technique
Write Like You (The Best You Possible)
In the ChoiceScript forums, someone recently asked:
What makes a passage enjoyable? The style, the grammar, or something else? In other words, how can I improve my writing?
These are extraordinarily broad questions, and books have been written about them. Many books.
This will not be book-length. But it … Keep reading
Update to Table-Driven NPC Actions
After last Thursday’s article, Andrew Plotkin pointed out that I could have been using rules instead of activities. From his intfiction.org post:
“It will be simpler and take less overhead if you have a “rule” column and a bunch of one-off rules:
Code:
Table of Caleb Actions … Keep reading
Table-Driven NPC Actions in Inform 7
This post will discuss the code structure of 18 Rooms to Home: Room 15. It will not discuss anything except the code structure, so there aren’t any spoilers – but if you’d prefer to avoid all discussion whatsoever, this is a good post to skip.
Also, this post will … Keep reading
ChoiceScript Tool: RandomTest_NoDisp
The most useful built-in testing tool for ChoiceScript is the randomtest system.
But randomtest is becoming unusable for me. My game is choice-dense, and each time I run randomtest, it shows me every choice made by the random generator. Which means the recommended 10,000 iterations produce a result over … Keep reading
Excuse Me, You Call This Clear Source Code?
One Weird Trick That Could Save You… (Inform 7 tables)
Motivation for the Solo Indie Game Dev (with commentary by @yayfrens)
“How do you stay motivated?”
I’ve heard this question hundreds of times, both on Twitter and in person. Motivation is one of the biggest common problems for solo indie game devs. If there’s no one beside you to cheer you along, it can be really hard to keep going.
In … Keep reading
Matt Chelen’s Another Interactive Fiction Engine List
Occasionally, the thought crosses my mind: what if I created a game in every existing interactive fiction engine, something tailored to capture its strengths? It would be a whole lot of work, but it would also ensure that I know the strengths of every system out there (an appealing thought!)
Version control with Mercurial and Tortoise HG
ChoiceScript doesn’t have integrated version control. If I select three paragraphs of source code, cut them to move somewhere else, and then lose them out of the clipboard by cutting something else, then the only way to fix my mistake is with “undo”. And it only works if I … Keep reading