Where to Learn More

Once you’ve started writing with Inform, you’ll find the built-in Documentation extremely useful. Pages in the Documentation that may not have made much sense to begin with will turn out, after a month or two, to be very clearly written and easy to understand. In particular, the more than 400 Examples are a huge resource — but to get the most out of them, you’ll need to study the code line by line. The explanations that are included in the Examples are often brief and don’t mention interesting features. After reading portions of the Documentation, you’ll find the Search field in the IDE more and more useful. By typing a half-remembered phrase (such as “something new”), you can quickly locate a page that has the information you need.

If — no, make that “when” — you have questions about how to use Inform, you’ll find the forum at intfiction.org a tremendous resource. If you post a question there, you’ll probably be able to read an answer posted by an Inform expert within a few hours — or at worst, the next morning.

To get the most out of the forum, a few simple procedures will help:

  1. Post your question in the Inform section of the forum. Inform 7 is not the only programming system discussed in the forum, and you want to guide the right people to your post by making it clear what system you’re using.

  2. Describe your problem as clearly as you can. Questions that are rambling or confusing will be less likely to lead to helpful responses than questions that are clear and concise.

  3. Before posting, try to create a very short example game (no longer than 20 lines) that shows the problem you’re having. This will make it easier for the experts to see what you’re doing wrong — and in the process of creating the example game, you may figure out how to solve the problem yourself! (It often works that way, in my experience.)

Carolyn VanEseltine has a quick-start I7 tutorial at www.sibylmoon.com/welcome-to-adventure/. For more general advice on writing IF, the ifwiki (http://www.ifwiki.org/) is a good place to start your search. A lot of information is available on the Internet, some of it tucked away in unlikely places, but the wiki has links to most of it. Emily Short’s interactive fiction blog (http://emshort.wordpress.com/) also has lots of useful resources. Another page with information is http://ifanswers.com.