I feel a little silly posting this, but since Andrew posted about Interactive Fiction Writing Month, I figure I'll post my entry.
The first week's assignment (after getting the compiler running and reading through some tutorials) was to create a few rooms with a few objects in the rooms, using at least three different attributes (scenery, container, light, etc.).
I have some programming experience, but I've never played with Inform before, so I kept it pretty simple. You can play it online here (thanks to the Parchment web-based Z-machine interpreter). It's just a few rooms, but there actually is something to do, including a win condition. Note that it hasn't been tested much by people besides me, so it may behave weirdly.
I'm happy to hear your thoughts about it, and I'll be posting each week's assignment, which should culminate in an actual playable game.
Nice! I really liked what you needed to do to win.
Nicely done. How did you come up with the idea? Inspiration isn't striking me so I'll probably skip IFWM.
By the way, I imported your game into Waterpoint, a MOO where someone implemented a Z-machine interpreter. It lets multiple people play the game collaboratively, which I'm watching now. It's fun!
Thanks, Deirdra. After seeing the Week 2 assignment, I was thinking how you are already well on your way to that, as I got some nice hints of the PC from your Week 1 assignment. (I need to find time to play everyone else's.)
No clue where I came up with the idea. Just some stuff floating around in my head. It's possible that the morbid element was inspired by watching Dexter on DVD.
Interesting about Waterpoint. Of course, as I have been working on this, the natural similarities to MUD coding (I was on LPMUDs back in college) occurred to me. I wonder how most games would work being played at the same time by multiple players. I would imagine that some of the more complex ones might have issues.
No, it works nicely for lots of IF. There's an IFMud group that meets regularly to group-play a game, as a "book club" sort of activity.
http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/ClubFloyd
(ClubFloyd is implemented differently from Waterpoint -- it's a MUD bot rather than an interpreter implemented in MUD code -- but the result for users is the same.)
Yeah, it's not that the game has multiple players, or at least not in any interesting way; it's more like multiple people are sitting at the keyboard together and any of them can issue commands whenever. There's still only one protagonist and one point of view. Back in college I tried to start a Multi-Player Interactive Fiction mailing list to try to explore some of the issues involved with making muds be more like IF, but it never really got off the ground.