Still going strong

You might have heard that Neophyte from In the Company of Grues blog had to drop out from the IF Trainer project at least for a little while because of real life issues. This doesn't mean the project is dead—I'm still working on it and it's going through alpha testing right now.

If you're interested in helping or seeing how it looks like right now you can head to the alpha testing information page and take a look. The project schedule has been pushed forward about a month and I'm hoping to release something in time for PAX Prime at the beginning of September.

Collecting real life gameplay data with Parchment

There was a lot of talk during PAX East and elsewhere about collecting real life data from people playing IF. I'm proud to announce that I've hacked the Parchment web interpreter to do just this: it saves transcripts to the server every time a game is played.

Try it out yourself: Click here to start a game and then open this page to a new browser window. Enter a command in the game and see how the transcript in the live feed updates. (If you don't see your game in the live feed page, reload it. It shows the three latest games being played at the time the feed page was loaded.)

And then there's the beef: I've made a rudimentary statistics page that shows some interesting information using the collected data, including most used commands and average turn count and playtime.

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The IF Trainer project

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 is at inthecompanyofgrues.com/iftrainer where you can see how the game is coming along and leave your own comments.

We're aiming to release at the beginning of September, in time for PAX Prime and before IFcomp starts to avoid being overshadowed.

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The TADS fatigue

I have two things to say about TADS 3: a) as a programming language it's most excellent and b) the library is huge.

TADS's learning curve is very steep at the beginning but I have a feeling that once you get a decent grasp of the language you can do advanced stuff quite easily. With Inform 7 the learning curve is almost the opposite: you can get in with no effort at all, but when you get to the advanced stuff you hit a brick wall.

This is the third time I've started trying to learn TADS. The first two times the library was just too overwhelming and I didn't get very far before just becoming tired. Now I've picked it up again and it's going better than before. While I've never had as much fun programming as I have when working with Inform, TADS is also fun but in a different way: the feeling of harnessing its raw power is what makes TADS a pleasure to work with.

Just to tame this beast I'm going to do my next project in TADS. An old acquaintance is about to return...

Some useful Inform 7 extensions

Very often I turn transcripting on when I start playing IF. As a side effect Zoom automatically runs the command VERSION, which in case of Inform 7 games shows the list of extensions the game uses. More often than not the list is empty.

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 exposure, including blogging about the best ones. I'll take a head start by introducing some of my own favorites.

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PAX East vibes

As many of you know, there was a considerable amount of IF content in the PAX East 2010 convention, including a whole hotel room full of IF people the whole weekend. Here are some thoughts which I admit are quite similar to what other people have said (almost as if they had been to the same convention!)

While it was a pleasure in itself to meet people with who you could actually talk about IF and have a meaningful conversation, I want to make it known that the IF crowd is the nicest and most amicable people I have ever met. Usually in any group there's at least one douche in a dozen, but I guess they all stayed home this time.

There were two main topics that seemed to pop up at every turn: collaborative IF development and widening the IF audience. The latter revolved pretty much around rebirth of commercial IF, or hopes thereof.
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