I bet you thought I’d forgotten all about this, hadn’t you? Well, you’re only mostly right! I hadn’t forgotten! I just got really busy and then the de-make got really hard. As easy as it is to create rooms and items in Inform 7 it isn’t so easy programming for how said objects, and people are supposed to interact with the player.
My first hang up was not having all the items the player can pick up in each room simply be listed whenever they typed ‘look.’ Then it was getting a Character to reply to the player when the player talked to him. Next, I realized I needed to explicitly tell the game that some items couldn’t be picked up and carried away by the player (like trees, rocks, rivers, etc…) It dawned on me that I might need, no I definitely needed some help.
I did some research and this book: Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 kept popping up. So, I ordered it. I’d taken myself to the limits of winging it with Inform 7, I have the map, I have the various items, and I even have some characters in the code. But, none of it works together.
I hope to fix that soon! Barring that. I might put the de-make on the back burner and try something a little simpler, and original first. You wouldn’t think a 20+ year old game would be such a complicated beast. And, I’m sure for coders and designers it might not be. For me, though this has been quite the challenge! I’m dedicated to seeing it through to the end though!
I’m looking forward to seeing this!