2. Tools of the trade

C was a captain, all covered with lace;
D was a drunkard, and had a red face.
../_images/picC.png

onventional – static – fiction can be written using nothing more than pencil and paper, or typewriter, or word-processor; however, the requirements for producing IF are a little more extensive, and the creative process slightly more complex.

  • For static fiction, you first write the text, and then you check it by reading what you’ve written.
  • For IF, you still have to write all of the text, but you also have to establish what text gets displayed when. Once you have written the necessary Inform instructions, you use a compiler program to convert them into a playable format. The resulting information is played by an interpreter program, which permits you to interact with your developing world.

With static fiction What You Write Is What You Read, but with IF the format in which you initially write the game doesn’t bear much resemblance to the text which the interpreter ultimately displays. For example, the “William Tell” game, in the form that we wrote it, starts like this:

!============================================================================
Constant Story "William Tell";
Constant Headline
            "^A simple Inform example
             ^by Roger Firth and Sonja Kesserich.^";

Include "Parser";
Include "VerbLib";

!============================================================================
! Object classes

Class   Room
  has   light;

...

You will never need to look at it in the form produced by the compiler:

050000012C6C2C2D1EF6010A0C4416900010303230313031004253FEA90C0000
0000000000000000000000000000168F000000000000010200000000362E3231
...

but, as you’ll notice from the full transcript in Appendix C – “William Tell” story, the player will see the following:

The place: Altdorf, in the Swiss canton of Uri.  The year is 1307, at
which time Switzerland is under rule by the Emperor Albert of
Habsburg.  His local governor -- the vogt -- is the bullying Hermann
Gessler, who has placed his hat atop a wooden pole in the centre of
the town square; everybody who passes through the square must bow to
this hated symbol of imperial might...

Clearly, there’s more to writing IF than just laying down the words in the right order. Fortunately, we can make one immediate simplification: the translated form produced by the Inform compiler – those cryptic numbers and letters held in what’s known as the story file – is designed to be read by the interpreter program. The story file is an example of a “binary” file, containing data intended for use only by a computer program. Forget all that unreadable gibberish.

So that leaves just the first form – the one starting “Constant Story” – which represents the tale written as a piece of IF. That’s the source file (so called because it contains the game in its original, source, form) which you create on your computer. The source file is a “text” (or “ASCII”) file containing words and phrases which can be read – admittedly after a little tuition, which is what this guide is all about – by humans.

How do you create that source file? Using a third software program: an editor. However, unlike the compiler and interpreter, this program isn’t dedicated to the Inform system – or even to IF. An editor is an entirely general tool for creating and modifying text files; you’ve probably already got a basic one on your computer (an IBM PC running Windows comes with NotePad, while an Apple Macintosh has SimpleText or TextEdit), or you can download a better one from the Internet. An editor is like a word-processing program such as MS Word, only much less complex; no fancy formatting features, no bold or italics or font control, no embedded graphics; it simply enables you to type lines of text, which is exactly what’s needed to create an IF game.

If you look at the game source above, or in Appendix C – “William Tell” story, you’ll notice Include "Parser"; and Include "VerbLib"; a few lines down from the top of the file. These are instructions to the Inform compiler to “include” – that is, to merge in the contents – of files called Parser.h and VerbLib.h. These are not files which you have to create; they’re standard library files, part of the Inform system. All that you have to do is remember to Include them in every game that you write. Until you’ve a fair understanding of how Inform works, you’ve no need to worry about what they contain (though you can look if you want to: they’re readable text files, just like the ones this guide will teach you to write).

So, we’ve now introduced all of the bits and pieces which you need in order to write an Inform adventure game:

  • a text editor program which can create and modify the source file containing the descriptions and definitions of your game. Although it’s not recommended, you can even use a word-processing program to do this, but you have to remember to save your game in Text File format;
  • some Inform library files which you Include in your own game source file in order to provide the model world – a basic game environment and lots of useful standard definitions;
  • the Inform compiler program, which reads your source file (and the library files) and translates your descriptions and definitions into another format – the story file – intended only for...
  • an Inform interpreter program, which is what players of your game use. A player doesn’t require the source file, library files or compiler program, just the interpreter and the game in compiled format (which, because it’s a binary file not meaningful to human eyes, neatly discourages players from cheating).

All of those, apart from the editor, can be downloaded for free from the IF Archive. One approach is to fetch them individually, following the guidance on Graham’s page: visit http://www.inform-fiction.org/ and look for the “Software” section. However, if you’re using a PC or a Mac, you’ll find it easier to download a complete package containing everything that you need to get started.

Inform on an IBM PC (running Microsoft Windows)

Although the Windows operating system is upgraded on a fairly regular basis, its basic capabilities and ways of working have remained more-or-less consistent for many years. The information here applies to PCs running Windows 95 onwards.

Installing and testing Inform

Follow these steps:

  1. Download http://www.firthworks.com/roger/downloads/inform_pc_env.zip to a temporary location on your PC.

  2. Use a tool like WinZip to unzip the downloaded file, giving you a new Inform folder. Move this folder (and its contents) to a suitable location on your PC – a good place would be C:\My Documents\Inform, but you could also use C:\Documents and Settings\yourname\My Documents\Inform, C:\Inform or C:\Program Files\Inform. You should now have this set of folders:

    ../_images/inform_pc_env.png

    In order to make the download small and fast, these folders include just enough to get you started as an Inform designer – the compiler and interpreter programs, the library files, the Ruins.inf example file from the Inform Designer’s Manual, and a template for your own first game. A few other folders are included as placeholders where you could later download additional components, if you wanted them. As soon as possible, you should download the Inform Designer’s Manual into the Inform\Doc folder – it’s an essential document to have, and has been omitted from this download only because of its 3MB size.

  3. To verify that the downloaded files work properly, use Windows Explorer to display the contents of the Inform\Games\MyGame1 folder: you will see the two files MyGame1.bat and MyGame1.inf:

    ../_images/filelist1.png

    MyGame1.inf is a tiny skeleton game in Inform source format. By convention, all Inform source files have an extension of .inf; Windows has an inbuilt definition for .inf files, and so shows its Type as “Setup Information”, but this doesn’t seem to matter. If you double-click the file, it should open in NotePad so that you can see how it’s written, though it probably won’t mean much – yet.

  1. MyGame1.bat is an MS-DOS batch file (an old kind of text-only computer program, from the days before point-and-click interfaces) which runs the Inform compiler. Double-click it; a DOS window opens as the game compiles, and you’ll see this:

    C:\My Documents\Inform\Games\MyGame1>..\..\Lib\Base\Inform MyGame1
+include_path=.\,..\..\Lib\Base,..\..\Lib\Contrib | more

Inform 6.30 for Win32 (27th Feb 2004)

C:\My Documents\Inform\Games\MyGame1>pause "at end of compilation"
Press any key to continue . . .

    Press the space bar, then close the DOS window.

    Note

    On Windows NT, 2000 and XP, the DOS window closes of its own accord when you press the space bar.

  2. A story file MyGame1.z5 has appeared in the folder; this is the compiled game, which you can play using an interpreter:

    ../_images/filelist2.png

    The extension of .z5 signifies that the story file contains a Z-machine game in Version 5 (today’s standard) format.

  3. Use Windows Explorer to display the contents of the Inform\Bin\Frotz folder, and double-click Frotz.exe; the interpreter presents an Open a Z-code Game dialog box.

  4. Browse to display the Inform\Games\MyGame1 folder, and select MyGame1.z5. Click Open. The game starts running in the Windows Frotz 2002 window.

  5. When you tire of “playing” the game – which won’t take long – you can type the QUIT command, you can select File > Exit, or you can simply close the Frotz window.

  6. Using the same techniques, you can compile and play Ruins.inf, which is held in the Inform\Games\Download folder. RUINS is the game used as an example throughout the Inform Designer’s Manual.

Setting file associations

The business of first starting the interpreter, and then locating the story file that you want to play, is clumsy and inconvenient. Fortunately, when you first run the Frotz interpreter, it automatically creates an association with story files whose extension is .z5. From now on, you’ll be able to play a game simply by double-clicking its story file. If some any reason this doesn’t work, you can set up the association yourself:

  1. Double-click MyGame1.z5; Windows asks you to select the program which is to open it:
    • type Z-code V5 Adventure as the “Description for...“
    • click to select “Always use this program...“
    • click Other...
  2. Browse to display the Inform\Bin\Frotz folder, and select Frotz.exe. Click Open.

Changing the Windows icon

If the Windows icon that’s displayed alongside MyGame1.z5 doesn’t look right, you can change it.

  1. In Windows Explorer, either select View > Options... and click File Types, or select Tools > Folder Options... and click File Types:

    • select the game file type in the list, which is in order either of application (Frotz) or of extension (Z5)
    • click Edit...

  2. In the Edit File Type dialog, click Change Icon.

  3. In the Change Icon dialog, ensure that the file name is Inform\Bin\Frotz\Frotz.exe, and select one of the displayed icons. Click OK to close all the dialogs. The files in the folder should now look like this:

    ../_images/filelist3.png

Compiling using a batch file

You can view – and of course change – the contents of MyGame1.bat, the batch file which you double-click to run the compiler, using any text editor. You’ll see two lines, something like this (the first chunk is all on one long line, with a space between the MyGame1 and the +include_path):

..\..\Lib\Base\Inform MyGame1
            +include_path=.\,..\..\Lib\Base,..\..\Lib\Contrib | more
pause "at end of compilation"

These long strings of text are command lines – a powerful interface method predating the icons and menus that most computer users know. You won’t need to master the command line interface in order to start using Inform, but this section will tell you what these particular command lines are doing. There are four parts to the first line:

  1. Inform refers to the compiler program, and ..\..\Lib\Base is the name of the folder which contains it (addressed relative to this folder, the one which holds the source file). Double-dots stand for “go to the parent folder”.

  2. MyGame1 is the name of the Inform source file; you don’t need to mention its extension of .inf if you don’t want to.

  3. +include_path=.\,..\..\Lib\Base,..\..\Lib\Contrib tells the compiler where to look for files like Parser and VerbLib which you’ve Included. Three locations are suggested: this folder, which holds the source file (.\); the folder holding the standard library files (..\..\Lib\Base); the folder holding useful bits and pieces contributed by the Inform community (..\..\Lib\Contrib). The three locations are searched in that order.

    Note

    On the command line, you sometimes also see a compiler switch such as -S, used for controlling detailed aspects of how the compiler operates. Rather than do that here, we find it more convenient to place any necessary switches at the very top of the source file, as we’ll explain in the next chapter.

  4. | more causes the compiler to pause if it finds more mistakes than it can tell you about on a single screen, rather than have them scroll off the top of the MS-DOS window. Press the space bar to continue the compilation.

The second line – pause "at end of compilation" – just prevents the window from closing before you can read its contents, as it otherwise would on Windows NT, 2000 and XP.

You’ll need to have a new batch file like this to match each new source file which you create. The only item which will differ in the new file is the name of the Inform source file – MyGame1 in this example. You must change this to match the name of the new source file; everything else can stay the same in each .bat file that you create.

Getting a better editor

Although NotePad is adequate when you’re getting started, you’ll find life much easier if you obtain a more powerful editor program. We recommend TextPad, available as shareware from http://www.textpad.com/; in addition, there are some detailed instructions at http://www.onyxring.com/informguide.aspx?article=14 on how to improve the way that TextPad works with Inform. The biggest single improvement, the one that will make game development dramatically simpler, is being able to compile your source file from within the editor. No need to save the file, switch to another window and double-click the batch file (and indeed, no further need for the batch file itself): just press a key while editing the file – and it compiles there and then. You can also run the interpreter with similar ease. The convenience of doing this far outweighs the small amount of time needed to obtain and configure TextPad.

Inform on an Apple Macintosh (running OS X)

Whereas our instructions for using Inform on a PC apply to just about all versions of Windows, on the Macintosh we need to be more precise. Our guidance here is specifically for Mac OS X, rather than for its predecessor OS 9, and it may be helpful if we first mention a few relevant differences.

Mac OS X is a robust system constructed around – or on top of – BSD [1] UNIX. There are several kinds of applications that will run on your Mac OS X:

  • Aqua: specifically designed for the Graphical User Interface of Mac OS X, and taking advantage of its underlying technologies. Broadly, there are two types of Aqua application:
    • Cocoa: built with programming tools designed for Mac OS X.
    • Carbon: built with the programming tools designed for Mac OS 9 and earlier versions, but “translated” to take advantage of OS X.
  • Classic: designed to work on Mac OS 9 and earlier versions. They need to run in the Classic environment of OS X; roughly speaking, Classic is an emulation of the older Mac systems.
  • X11: based on a windowing system designed for the UNIX/Linux world. They need an X-Windows server to run, and their appearance and functionality may seem a lot different to what the Aqua user expects.
  • UNIX: most UNIX programs (including Linux) will run on your Mac OS X, but they usually have to be accessed (or configured) from the UNIX core of your Mac, through the Terminal utility.

These differences may be significant, since some of the tools designed to develop and run IF on a Mac system (for example, ones you’ll find in the Archive) have been built by programmers working in different environments with varying technologies. We have tried to select tools that will make your life easy as a beginner, but in time you may want to investigate alternative approaches.

Installing and testing Inform

Follow these steps:

  1. Download http://www.firthworks.com/roger/downloads/inform_macosx_env.sit to a temporary location on your Mac.

  2. Use a tool like StuffIt Expander to unpack the downloaded file (if your system configuration is standard, a mere double-click will make it self-extract at the current location, if it hasn’t already expanded all by itself). You’ll now have a new Inform folder. Move this folder (and its contents) to a suitable location in your Mac.

    Note

    It is a good idea for now to place it in your home directory; otherwise, a few pre-configured items may not work as explained. Once you learn the basics of the configuration, you may move the Inform folder to a different location and hack all the defaults like the professionals do.

    You should now have this set of folders:

    ../_images/inform_mac_env.png

    In order to make the download small and fast, these folders include just enough to get you started as an Inform designer – the compiler and interpreter programs, the library files, the Ruins.inf example from the Inform Designer’s Manual, and a template for your own first game, which you may copy and rename each time you begin a new Inform project. A few other folders are included as placeholders where you could later download additional components, if you wanted them. As soon as possible, you should download the Inform Designer’s Manual into the Inform/Doc folder – it’s an essential document to have, and has been omitted from this download only because of its 3MB size.

  3. To verify that the downloaded files work properly, use the Finder to display the contents of the Inform/Games/MyGame1 folder: you will see the files MyGame1.command and MyGame1.inf:

    ../_images/mac_filelist1.png

    MyGame1.inf is a tiny skeleton game in Inform source format. By convention, all Inform source files have an extension of .inf. However, Mac OS X may show its Kind as “FUJI BAS IMG document”, and try to open it with GraphicConverter. If you’re not a regular user of FUJI BAS IMG documents, you’ll probably want to change this. Either:

    • right-click on the file (or Ctrl-click)
    • select Open with and choose Other...
    • in the Open with dialog, go to the Applications folder and select TextEdit.
    • click to select “Always open with“
    • click Open.

    or:

    • right-click on the file (or Ctrl-click)
    • press Option, select Always open with and choose Other...
    • in the Open with dialog, go to the Applications folder and select TextEdit.
    • click Open.

    Now, if you double-click the file, it should open in TextEdit so that you can see how it’s written, though it probably won’t mean much – yet.

    Note

    The above process may affect only this specific file. To change the program that opens by default all .inf files, try this:

    • right-click on the file (or Ctrl-click)
    • select Get Info
    • in the Open with tab, select TextEdit as the application
    • click the Change All... button, and confirm the change when asked.

  4. MyGame1.command is a Terminal Shell Script (a UNIX executable command-line file, a kind of text-only computer program from the days before point-and-click interfaces) which runs the Inform compiler. Double-click it; a UNIX window opens as the game compiles, and you’ll see something like this (the working path will reflect your folder hierarchy):

    Last login: Sat Jul 3 03:07:51 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
/Users/Dave/Inform/Games/MyGame1/MyGame1.command; [Hal:~] Dave%
       /Users/Dave/Inform/Games/MyGame1/MyGame1.command; exit
Inform 6.30 (27th Feb 2004)
logout
[Process completed]

    Todo

    Verify this output. It’s what’s in the PDF, but the command prompt looks like it’s in the wrong place.

  5. A story file MyGame1.z5 has appeared in the folder; this is the compiled game, which you can play using an interpreter:

    ../_images/mac_filelist2.png

    The extension of .z5 signifies that the story file contains a Z-machine game in Version 5 (today’s standard) format.

  6. Use the Finder to display the contents of the Inform/Bin/Zoom folder, and double-click Zoom; the interpreter presents an Open dialog box.

  7. Browse to display the Inform/Games/MyGame1 folder, and select MyGame1.z5. Click Open. The game starts running in the Zoom window.

  8. When you tire of “playing” the game – which won’t take long – you can type the QUIT command, you can select Zoom > Quit Zoom, or you can simply close the Zoom window.

Setting file associations

The business of first starting the interpreter, and then locating the story file that you want to play, is clumsy and inconvenient. Fortunately, when the system first “sees” the Zoom interpreter (which is a nice Aqua application) it automatically creates an association with story files whose extension is .z5 (and with other Infocom formats). From now on, you’ll be able to play a game simply by double-clicking its story file.

The files in the folder should now look like this:

../_images/mac_filelist3.png

Compiling using a command-line file

If you have followed these instructions to configure your system, every time that you need to compile your source code you just have to double-click on the file MyGame1.command. However, this file is good only for this folder and for MyGame1.inf.

If you want to start coding another game, you may copy the folder MyGame1 with all its contents and rename it as you please (for example, MyGame2 or something more appropriate). Inside the folder, you’ll also want to rename the relevant files:

MyGame1.inf might become MyGame2.inf, or MobyDick.inf, or...

MyGame1.command would change to match: MyGame2.command, or MobyDick.command.

You can view – and of course change – the contents of MyGame2.command, the command file which you double-click to run the compiler, using any text editor. You’ll see two lines, something like this (the second chunk is all on one long line, with a space between the MyGame1 and the +include_path):

cd ~/Inform/Games/MyGame1/
../../Lib/Base/inform630_macosx MyGame1
                  +include_path=./,../../Lib/Base,../../Lib/Contrib

These long strings of text are command lines – a powerful interface method predating the icons and menus that most computer users know. You won’t need to master the command line interface in order to start using Inform, but this section will introduce you to a few basic concepts to get your bearings. The first line changes the working directory to ~/Inform/Games/MyGame1/. The command cd (also known as chdir, short for “Change Directory to”) lets you travel to the desired folder, specified by the path, in this case: ~/Inform/Games/MyGame1/. The ~ symbol stands for your home directory. That is, if your user name were Dave, the above path is equal to:

/Users/Dave/Inform/Games/MyGame1/

You want to change that line so that it reads: cd ~/Inform/Games/MyGame2/

There are three parts to the second line:

  1. inform630_macosx refers to the compiler program, and ../../Lib/Base is the name of the folder which contains it (addressed relative to this folder, the one which holds the source file). Double-dots stand for “go to the parent folder”.

  2. MyGame1 is the name of the Inform source file; you don’t need to mention its extension of .inf if you don’t want to. You’ll want to change this to match the name of your new file: MyGame2.

  3. +include_path=./,../../Lib/Base,../../Lib/Contrib tells the compiler where to look for files like Parser and VerbLib which you’ve Included in the source file (this may sound confusing now, but it will make a lot of sense after you’ve delved a bit deeper into this Guide). Three locations are suggested, separated by commas: this folder, which holds the source file (./); the folder holding the standard library files (../../Lib/Base); the folder holding useful bits and pieces contributed by the Inform community (../../Lib/Contrib). The three locations are searched in that order.

    Note

    On the command line, you sometimes also see a compiler switch such as -S, used for controlling detailed aspects of how the compiler operates. Rather than do that here, we find it more convenient to place any necessary switches at the very top of the source file, as we’ll explain in the next chapter.

Once you’ve finished editing those lines, Save the file (not SaveAs), overwriting the original, and make sure that your text editor doesn’t append an extension like .txt (TextEdit, the default editor that comes with OS X, is polite enough to ask you about this).

You’ll need to have a new command file like this to match each new source file which you create. The only item which will differ in the new file is the name of the Inform source file – MyGameN. You must change this to match the name of the new source file; everything else can stay the same in each .command file that you create.

Making your own command-line file

There are two peculiarities by which your system understands that MyGame1.command is a Terminal Shell Script. One is the extension .command, and the other is an attribute of the file which marks it as “executable” (the “executable bits”). If it doesn’t meet both conditions, MyGame1.command won’t run as it should. You have to be careful when editing this file: if you were, for instance, to open it in a text editor and save it to a different location with a different name, the executable bits might get lost, and when you double-click it, you would see:

../_images/mac_exec_error.png

To make a command file from scratch (also, to fix this problem) you can follow these steps:

  1. Open any text editor and write (using your own path):

    cd ~/Inform/Games/MyGameN/
../../Lib/Base/inform630_macosx MyGameN
              +include_path=./,../../Lib/Base,../../Lib/Contrib

    where MyGameN stands for the name you have chosen for your Inform project.

  2. Save the file in the folder MyGameN and call it MyGameN.command. Make sure that the text editor doesn’t append a .txt extension; if it does, rename the file manually.

  3. Go to Applications > Utilities and double-click on Terminal. This opens the utility which provides you with a set of windows to access the UNIX command line. Supposing the computer is named Hal, and the user Dave, you should see something like this:

    Last login: Wed Jun 30 18:05:55 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
[Hal:~] Dave%

  4. Every time that you open a Terminal window, you’re at your home directory (as noted by the tilde after the computer’s name). You can travel to your working folder by typing:

    cd Inform/Games/MyGameN

    You’ll see how the path changes:

    [Hal:~/Inform/Games/MyGameN] Dave%

    Now you can make the command file executable with:

    chmod 777 MyGameN.command

  5. Alternatively, you can omit the cd command if you give the full path to chmod:

    chmod 777 ~/Inform/Games/MyGameN/MyGameN.command

    This sets the executable bits for the file MyGameN.command.

  6. Close the Terminal window.

Now, every time you need to compile your game, you can just double-click on MyGameN.command from the Finder.

Getting a better editor

Although TextEdit is adequate when you’re getting started, you’ll find life much easier if you obtain a more powerful editor program. We’d really like to recommend one – there’s an exciting list of possibilities at http://osx.hyperjeff.net/Apps/apps.php?sub=5 – but at the time of writing none of them seems outstandingly suited to IF authorship. If you find one that works really well, please let us know.

More about the editor

As well as the ones that we recommend, other good text editors are listed at http://www.firthworks.com/roger/editors/. One feature that’s well worth looking out for is “hotkey compilation” – being able to run the compiler from within the editor. Another is “syntax colouring”, where the editor understands enough of Inform’s syntax rules to colour-code your source file; for example: red for brackets, braces and parentheses [ ] { } and ( ), blue for reserved words like Object and print, green for items in quotes like ‘...’ and ”...”, and so on. Syntax colouring is of great assistance in getting your source file correct and thus avoiding silly compilation errors.

More about the compiler

The Inform compiler is a powerful but undramatic software tool; it does an awful lot of work, but it does it all at once, without stopping to ask you any questions. Its input is a readable text source file; the output is a story file, also sometimes known as a Z-code file (because it contains the game translated into code for the Z-machine, which we describe in the next section).

If you’re lucky, the compiler will translate your source file into Z-code; perhaps surprisingly, it doesn’t display any form of “success” message when it succeeds. Often, however, it fails, because of mistakes which you’ve made when writing the game. Inform defines a set of rules – a capital letter here, a comma there, these words only in a certain order, those words spelled just so – about which the compiler is extremely fussy. If you accidentally break the rules, the compiler complains: it refuses to write a Z-code file. Do not worry about this: the rules are easy to learn, but just as easy to break, and all Inform designers inadvertently do so on a regular basis. There’s some additional information about dealing with these mistakes, and about controlling how the compiler behaves, in Compiling your game.

More about the interpreter

One of the big advantages of the way Inform works is that a compiled game – the Z-code story file – is portable between different computers. That’s not just from one PC to another: exactly the same story file will run on a PC, a Mac, an Amiga, UNIX workstations, IBM mainframes, PalmOS hand-helds, and on dozens of other past, present and future computers. The magic that makes this happen is the interpreter program, a software tool which pretends to be a simple computer called a Z-machine. The Z-machine is an imaginary (or “virtual”) computer, but its design has been very carefully specified, so that an expert programmer can quite easily build one. And that’s exactly what has happened: a Macintosh guru has built an Inform interpreter which runs on Apple Macs, a UNIX wizard has built one for UNIX workstations, and so on. Sometimes, you even get a choice; for popular machines like the PC and the Mac there are several interpreters available. And the wonderful thing is: each of those interpreters, on each of those computers, is able to play every Inform game that’s ever been written and, as a surprise bonus, all of the classic 1980s Infocom games like “Zork” and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” as well!

(Actually, that last sentence is a slight exaggeration; a few games are very large, or have pictures included within them, and not all interpreters can handle this. However, with that small pinch of salt, it’s pretty accurate.)

That’s enough waffling: let’s get started! It’s time to begin designing our first game.

Footnotes

[1]“BSD” stands for Berkeley Software Distribution, the name of the UNIX derivative distributed in the 1970s from the University of California, Berkeley, and used collectively for the modern descendants of those distributions.