Heirs of Infocom: Where interactive fiction authors and games stand today | Hacker News Reader

Heirs of Infocom: Where interactive fiction authors and games stand today

arstechnica.com

76 pointsshawndumas19 comments

I expected to see more about Twine.[1] It's really simple, but it lets you build a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story easily. People who haven't programmed before have picked it up and done interesting things with it. I like the HyperCard analogy.[2]

[1] http://gimcrackd.com/etc/src/

[2] http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/twine-and-the-art-of-person...

So if you're interested I recommend Emily Short: https://emshort.wordpress.com/ as a general guide/jumping off point to the modern scene

Specifically, Bronze is a good game to get started, with some game features and a help system designed for beginners.

And anything that Zarf writes or recommends.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Plotkin http://www.eblong.com/zarf/if.html

I have a soft spot for interactive fiction. The only game I ever finished writing was an IF game that took place on my college campus (I created it using AGT[1], and was impressed that I could keep track of time to have locations behave differently when visited.)

I was super proud of myself for about a half a day before my roommate showed me that he had created our dorm as a level in Duke Nukem 3D, which proceeded to occupy all of us over a local IPX network for weeks.

It seems like smartphones and tablets definitely represent an opportunity for a resurgence, You could even utilize the platforms built-in text-to-speech and whatnot.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Game_Toolkit

Big fan of Frotz on iOS. I've played a few z-machine games over the last couple of years.

Funny thing is, my primary "in bed" reading device is also my iphone -- light, good screen, and easy to shut down when I am done.

I like Frotz as well - play it on my Windows Phone 8 (Nokia Lumia 928)

How does Frotz deal with the "no interpreters" rule in App Store?

Technically, the rule is "no interpreters that download code". To get around it, it bundles a decent chunk of the if-archive in the app and then registers as something that can open z-machine game files (so you can use Frotz to open a game from Dropbox, after downloading in Mobile Safari, etc.).

It was fun playing the old Infocom games on Frotz (just add the Z3/Z4/Z5 sources using the file transfer feature on iOS). For iOS, the sources are at http://code.google.com/p/iphonefrotz/ and http://sourceforge.net/projects/jfrotz/ is an Android port for those who prefer to roll their own.

If you haven't played Spider and Web, you need to! One of the undisputed classics: http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=2xyccw3pe0uovfad

I thought all the AAA publishers switched to interactive films after they gave up on making video games.

I recommend Anchorhead (1998). Inspired by Lovecraft, very well written. Puzzles are either simple or very logical, the biggest danger is that you miss an item or don't map properly. Atmosphere is at least as good as in Lovecraft books. And it's free.

YES! It never occurred to me, but the limited interfaces of smartphones are a perfect arena for interactive fiction without the grossly expensive visual collateral of so many modern PC and game station games.

For the most part, with the exception of keyboards. Without a physical keyboard, you're either giving up screen real estate (i.e. text you can read) or the keyboard is appearing and disappearing (which I find breaks my immersion in the game). Games are still playable, but there are also interface annoyances, sadly.

I was curious to see if I could get my hands on the documentary but the order page says "US Only". Is there a way for us Europeans to get a hold of a copy?

I'm not ashamed to say that I still play Hamurabi/Sumer after all these years...

Heh. Reminds me of the days when I used to run a Z-code interpreter on my Palm V.

FYI, Reconstructing Remy does appear to be available for iOS now.

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