Zarf’s already posted the schedule of IF-related events at PAX East 2011 (this coming weekend!), but as an egomaniac I just wanted to highlight the one event I’m directly involved with: Zarf and I are going to reprise the lightning-talk introduction to Inform that we first presented at GameLoop last summer. We’re going to build a very small game that shows off some of Inform’s major features, especially its natural-language syntax.
I love presenting Inform like this, because the language essentially sells itself. To my knowledge there is simply no other practical-use programming language on the planet, in any domain, whose source code reads like Inform’s. If you’ve never seen the language before, I could stand up there and implement the phone book at you, and it’d knock your socks off. So banging out a whole game in 45 minutes, with NPCs and puzzles and all that good stuff, should really bowl you over…
The talk will happen at 7 PM on Saturday, March 12, in the Alcott room in the Westin Waterfront hotel. Like the rest of the events happening there and in the suite, the talk is free and open to the public — you don’t need a PAX badge to come join us. Hope to see you there!
Are you guys going to come up with a game on the fly? Or do you already have it planned out? (And is it the same one as the GameLoop one?)
I warmed my own Inform knowledge back up last night by banging out a game draft; something like the GameLoop one, but slightly larger and more appropriate to the PAXish environment.
At the actual talk, we'll spend some time just building the first room and putting some interesting stuff in it, just showing off the most basic features of Inform. If folks in the audience want to steer it in a certain direction after that, we can go there; otherwise we'll fall back to building the rest of the game.
Please record this :)