This little quick-start guide has come a long way!
At this point, the Welcome to Adventure series provides a quick-start understanding of:
- how to make and connect rooms, with doors, lockable and otherwise
- how to make objects, including containers and supporters
- how to make new verbs, including out-of-world verbs like Help
- how to alter existing verbs for new functionality
- how to use if/then statements to check object properties
- how to change the state of existing object properties
- how to move the player from room to room
- how to make new kinds of objects with new properties
- how to turn on scoring and give points to the player
- how to end the game with custom messaging
It’s a good tool set, and definitely enough to make a game from scratch.
I’m still planning three more lessons, but I reconsidered the lesson plan today. This isn’t set in stone, but I think I’m going to cover:
- how to implement the dwarves
- how to implement a maze of twisty little passages
- how to implement darkness and the lamp
If there’s something else you’d really like me to cover, let me know. I’m discussing this in a thread on intfiction.org, and of course I’m reading the comments here!
Because this is a quick-start guide, I knew I’d only scratch the surface of Inform 7, but writing these tutorials has given me a whole new appreciation of the versatility and power available. My thanks to Graham Nelson (the creator of Inform), Emily Short (design advisor and primary documentation author, which means this is a microscopic version of her macroscopic effort), and everyone else responsible for Inform 7.
St. Baldrick’s Foundation
The Welcome to Adventure series began on November 3, 2014 as a Work for Charity Day project. If this guide is of use to you, please consider making a donation to St. Baldrick’s Foundation, which funds childhood cancer research, in honor of Rebecca Meyer and the Meyer Family.