Weekend and Inform
Had a really wonderful birthday weekend with Kristin and some writerly friends and their families. Boats were ridden (ok, one boat). Leinies were consumed by the deck on the lake. Blackberries were picked. And most of all, good company. (Karen has provided a helpful map of the premises on her blog.)
Besides the revisions of Total Oblivion, I’ve been diving into Inform 7, “a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language.” And I have to admit, I’m very impressed. Esp. since my actual programming skills are nil, which has always kept me away from Inform in the past. But the set-up on my ibook is pretty sweet, and allows for really intuitive game design, testing, etc. (although you still have to be rigorous). I’m already able to do a lot more in just goofing around in I7 for a week than I was in my previous 2 efforts. The set-up of I7 makes it VERY easy to plug in code from a lot of examples from a “recipe book” that you can access right next to your natural-language coding efforts.
Seriously, to all the fiction writers out there who happen to read this blog-if you want to play around with a really easy, simulationist-based creative effort based on one of your own fictions, or something new, you should really check it out.
