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Comment by haram_masala | Hacker News Reader

Related topic: how can a writer monetize their interactive fiction?

The same way Inkle does: make a game and sell it.

Ink in particular (as opposed to, say, Inform7) is strong here because it already supports Unity integration. Heaven's Vault was developed with Ink, and that's a 3D adventure game that happens to have its story branches managed by Ink but the user experience is far from typical IF fare.

But you can even make commercial parser games. Anchorhead and Hadean Lands are two relatively recent examples.

Commercial parser? Hadean Lands and Anchorhead (the commercial edition) are just gblorb/glulx, a rehash of the Z-Machine with 32 bit capabilities.

Said this, I'd like people knew Inform6 more, among IBG.pdf (Inform's Beginner Guide) and DM4.pdf (Inform6's manual).

The language is dumb easy. It's object oriented (almost literally, you declare in-game objects as... objects with properties), and the games can be run on legacy machines fastly, such as Amiga/Atari/68k Macs.

Here's an Inform6 libre game to start with:

http://www.amirrorclear.net/flowers/game/devours/

Also, I forgot: There's Puny Inform, a reduced subset from Inform6 with few changes here and there in order to create games targetting the 3th version of the Z-machine. Thus, the games will run anywhere, even on the C64, Spectrum, MSX, BBC, Linux, OSX, Windows... everywhere.

https://github.com/johanberntsson/PunyInform

Example on a commercial Z3 game:

https://hlabrande.itch.io/tristam-island

A libre one (Calypso):

http://microheaven.com/ozmoo/games/calypso/calypso.z3 https://github.com/dave-f/calypso

Commercial (parser games), not (commercial parser) games.

Ok, my fault, I parsed your phrase wrong :p.

Inform 7 progress has been "slowed" the last few years because a lot of work has been put into refactoring it to be more re-useful. Possibly not to the exact same extent as Ink has been to embedding in C#/Unity, though something resembling that has been part of the motivation.

The refactoring isn't necessarily making it "simpler" (especially compared to something like Puny Inform or even the people that have resurrected ZIL for the challenge of writing games with it), as it is defining a higher level object (world) model than just raw VM characteristics like Inform 6 or otherwise writing directly for a Z-Machine. But if it does reduce the coupling between stages of Inform 7 compilation it does offer some interesting tools for world building that Ink or Inform 6 can't quite offer.

A talk on some of the refactor progress and goals: http://inform7.com/talks/2019/06/14/narrascope.html

This is a skill that should be very valuable to pretty much any product design team, even outside games. Tech products are mostly UI, and UI is mostly interactive text. For some reason UI/UX design teams tend to be run by people who think visually or technically, with writing as an afterthought. I think the very specific skills required to write good IF would improve almost any UI, and there’s probably more money in that career than in a career writing IF.

I think you are on to something here. I am a developer and I am more interested in the content than the aesthetics.

There are a couple of publishers looking for writers (if you don't want to self-publish). The biggest general publisher I'm aware of is Choice of Games. [0] Unfortunately, they have the least interesting (to a programmer) scripting language. There are also many publishers of romance IF.

[0] https://www.choiceofgames.com/looking-for-writers/

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