(If you missed it, see my post about Week 1.)
The first week assignments are up. There are 20 of them, ranging from just a couple of rooms with a couple of objects to a full-blown short game. It was a lot of fun to see the things that people came up with.
The assignment for the second week was to add some more interactivity to your objects (including trying a puzzle and making the game winnable) and start defining the player character. There were some good readings on both of these topics, and I probably spent twice as much time reading this week as I did coding.
Here is my assignment for this week. I got rid of the puzzle from last week (even though it seemed to be good for a chuckle) and added a slightly more complex (and, I think, interesting) puzzle. I also spent some time on the player character, which I think worked pretty well. Additionally, I made more of the scenery in the room descriptions examinable and made sure that more verbs got non-default responses where appropriate. Please feel free to let me know what you think.
Also, we had a little meetup, including me and four people who aren't actually participating in IFWM (well, five, if you count the random stranger we picked up for bits of the conversation who overheard us and who had played the old Infocom games and had interesting things to say). We had a great time talking about IF, I got some suggestions for improving my game (which I just implemented before writing this post), and we decided that we're going to try to organize a regular monthly Boston IF meetup for people to chat about IF. More details on that last bit as I get more organized, but if you're local and interested in meetups, ping me at jacksonmead at the google mailing depot.
