Welcome To Adventure – Epilogue

“There is a loud explosion, and a twenty-foot hole appears in the far wall, burying the dwarves in the rubble. You march through the hole and find yourself in the main office, where a cheering band of friendly elves carry the conquering adventurer off into the sunset.” – Adventure by Will Crowther and Don Woods

Thanks for all the enthusiasm for the Welcome to Adventure Quick-Start Guide! The comments, tweets, and emails I received gave me momentum to see it through. I really appreciate the support and encouragement.

What this guide covered

In just nine articles, this guide provided a solid foundation to make a quick parser game.

It touched on the following parts of the Inform 7 handbook:

§2.12 Use options

§3.1. Descriptions
§3.2. Rooms and the map
§3.3. One-way connections
§3.4. Regions and the index map
§3.5. Kinds
§3.6. Either/or properties
§3.7. Properties depend on kind
§3.8. Scenery
§3.10. Properties holding text
§3.11. Two descriptions of things
§3.12. Doors
§3.13. Locks and keys
§3.15. Light and darkness
§3.17. Men, women and animals

§4.2 Using new kinds
§4.3 Degrees of certainty
§4.6 Properties again

§5.6. Text with variations

§6.14 Adjacent rooms and routes through the map

§7.1. Actions
§7.2. Instead rules
§7.3. Before rules
§7.5. After rules

§8.1 Change of values that vary
§8.4 Change of either/or properties
§8.5 Change of properties with values
§8.9 Moving the player
§8.10. Removing things from play
§8.11. Now…
§8.13. Checking on whereabouts
§8.15 Calling names
§8.18 Randomness

§9.2 Awarding points
§9.4 When play ends
§9.5. Every turn
§9.11 Future events

§11.1 What are phrases?
§11.2 The phrasebook
§11.3 Pattern matching
§11.6 If
§11.7 Begin and end
§11.8 Otherwise (synonymous with “else”)

§12.7 New actions
§12.9 Check, carry out, report
§12.15 Out of world actions

§13.4. To carry, to wear, to have

§16.1 Laying out tables
§16.6 Repeating through tables
§16.7 Blank entries
§16.16 Defining things with tables

§17.8. Understanding names

§18.18 Printing a refusal to act in the dark
§18.19 Printing the announcement of darkness
§18.20 Printing the announcement of light
§18.21 Printing the name of a dark room
§18.22 Printing the description of a dark room

§24.3. High-level debugging commands

What this guide didn’t cover

Nine lessons are only adequate to scrape the surface.

Chapter 1 – Preface, acknowledgements, and all that good stuff
Chapter 2 – Headings, debugging, and other things to make life easier
Chapter 3 – Backdrops, vehicles, carrying capacity, food, concealment, parts of things, directions
Chapter 4 – Default values of kinds, body parts, making identical objects
Chapter 5 – Everything cool you can do with text, including number-text conversions, accented letters, and inserting line breaks
Chapter 6 – How to define new adjectives and use existing adjectives in the source code (example: “an open door” means any door that is open, not a specific door named “open door”)
Chapter 7 – More about altering existing actions, and more details on various existing actions
Chapter 8 – Altering the command prompt or status line; more random actions
Chapter 9 – Everything to do with the built-in time system
Chapter 10 – Scenes, which are a system for orchestrating events based on conditions rather than timers
Chapter 11 – How to repeat through objects based on their description; how to create temporary variables; some other really important stuff
Chapter 12 – Persuasion mechanics for giving orders to NPCs and having them carried out; a whole lot more about how to build new actions
Chapter 13 – Relations, a way to describe connections and create new connections between objects
Chapter 14 – How to change the verb tense and person used in the narrative
Chapter 15 – Numbers, equations, logarithms, trigonometry (not kidding)
Chapter 16 – Way more about how to use tables effectively
Chapter 17 – How to create new grammar understood by the parser and override old grammar
Chapter 18 – What activities are, along with a huge list of standard activities and how they normally work
Chapter 19 – Rules and rulebooks, which are the core machinery of Inform 7
Chapter 20 – Altering text on the fly, including regular expressions
Chapter 21 – How to build and use lists
Chapter 22 – Even more about phrases and kinds
Chapter 23 – Adding graphics and sound; loading data from external files
Chapter 24 – Testing and debugging commands
Chapter 25 – How to release games, including cover art, walkthroughs, maps, and automatically generated websites
Chapter 26 – How and where to publish games
Chapter 27 – Adding extensions (external libraries); embedding Inform 6 code in Inform 7

Learning more about Inform 7

If you’ve enjoyed your quick-start tour, dig in! The interactive fiction forums at intfiction.org are a great place both to get help with Inform 7 and to share your completed game, and I’ve compiled a list of other Inform 7 resources to help you along the way.

St. Baldrick’s Foundation

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I began this quick-start guide on November 3, 2014 as a Work for Charity Day project. If this series has been useful to you and you have the ability, please consider donating to St. Baldrick’s Foundation, which raises money for childhood cancer research. Thank you!

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2 Comments

  1. Thank you very much for this Quick-Start guide. Good examples, simple explanations, enough information to write a simple story. Great work.

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