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Sometimes it strikes me how deep the puzzle-centered thinking is infused into the medium. I have played, and been annoyed by, many games that tell a great story and then break the flow by haphazardly cramming in a couple of puzzles, presumably because “IF must have puzzles.”

I’ve had to learn this lesson several times. Here’s a couple of examples.

I made an Invisiclues-style HTML hints page for a friend of mine and decided to share it with the rest of the world. The page is here with instructions to use included. Feel free to use it for any purpose.

As you might have heard from elsewhere, I’ve been asked by the author of In the Company of Grues blog to design and code a game that would be suitable to teach newcomers how to play IF. This is a pretty sweet deal because we’re having the entire development process completely transparent. The development wiki [...]

I begin this post by stating that I have two things to say about TADS 3: a) as a programming language it’s most excellent and b) the library is huge. Then I will proceed in saying more things about TADS.

I’m a big fan of extensions. Creating an IF game takes enough time as it is, so any way of avoiding reinventing the wheel someone has already invented and made public is a big plus. Extensions don’t get enough use, and I’m not alone with this opinion: Aaron Reed has called for more visibility, including blogging about the best ones. I’ll take a head start by introducing some of my own favorites.

An article about designing the puzzles of the 2008 game Escapade!, including the puzzle design map used in the process and discussion about how to create and use a similar map to design interactive fiction games.

One thing that seems to trip authors every time in I7 is finding the name of the action to work with. Here are some hints for finding the name of the action when you encounter the “that did not make sense as a description of an action” error.

Here’s a list of five easy things to do to give that final polish to your IF game. These are all things that many players come to expect from a well-made game and experience has shown that the lack of these basic things suggests a lack of overall quality as well.

Everybody’s always talking about how important it is to have your game tested (or at least I’m always talking about it). But does it really matter? Surely if you have a great idea and enough enthusiasm you can do without?