I shared the source of The Warbler’s Nest to GitHub last weekend, a project that took a couple of hours by one measure and nine months by another. I started getting the codebase ready for sharing last spring, shortly after giving an invited presentation about the game at MIT. I considered the event as good a capstone as any on the game’s active presence in my mind, and releasing the source struck me as appropriate epilogue. As it turned out, this preparation would end up perhaps the last personal project I picked up before a family crisis would occupy much of my attention until wintertime.[1] And when, things calmer, I happened across this MetaFilter thread asking about Inform source examples shortly after I received an email from a Warbler player pointing out an embarrassing typo in the story, I thought: Oh, right. And so GitHub.
Mere hours after announcing all this on Twitter and such, I would laugh out loud from the solid upstaging my little effort would receive next to a truly delightful surprise: Daniel Ravipinto announced a special 10-year-anniversary re-release of Slouching Towards Bedlam, an IFComp-winning masterpiece released by Star C. Foster and himself in 2003. Daniel recast the game into Inform 7 (which didn’t publicly exist ten years ago) as an exercise, and this in turn allowed him to easily publish a web page linking to both the downloadable game file and its source text. I sincerely recommend taking this opportunity to try the game if you haven’t already; I quite look forward to playing it through again, myself.
Casting around a bit, I find that Inform 7 source examples are not quite as scarce as I may have thought. Inform includes a facility for releasing nicely HTML-formatted source text alongside one’s game, and just because I somehow hadn’t noticed it before doesn’t mean nobody else did either. Two publicly available recipients of this treatment come to my mind immediately: Aaron Reed’s Sand-Dancer exhibits intentional beauty and readability at the source level, since it serves as the game slowly built between the covers of his Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 (which we’ve written about before). On another extreme, Emily Short made available the source for Counterfeit Monkey, which proves as eye-wateringly vast as the game itself. I note that one of the headings on that index page bears the title “Volume 5 - The Repository of All Things Possible”, and it does not exactly exaggerate. (Naturally, while this source is also quite readable, you really should play the game before browsing through its laid-bare secrets.[2])
I cannot fail to point out that Zarf quietly posted the source to several of his games some time ago, as well, including both his more recent work and classics like Shade. (Search for the word source in-page after opening that link.)
Lastly, on the topic of GitHub, Dannii Willis created the Friends of Inform 7 group, which contains lots of language extensions from various authors, as well as the open-source repository of Victor Gijsbers’ utterly gonzo Kerkerkruip, a procedural, stats-heavy, permadeathy dungeon crawl in the roguelike tradition, implemented entirely as prose-driven IF.
I have no doubts that many other examples of shared full-game Inform source lurk in the grue-infested darkness. If you know of a non-trivial Inform-based work with source available, do feel free to link to it here with a comment.
Update: As Juhana notes in the comments, “games with source available are neatly tagged at IFDB”. Wow, that’s quite a few games, too. Well, this is why I write these things.
[1]: And yes, dear reader, that would explain why I’ve written so little on this blog this past year, though I’ve no complaint about once again leaving it over to Zarf’s project-EKG in my absence. I have reason to believe that 2014 will be different, but time will tell…
[2]: Earlier this year, I wrote implementation-focused reviews of Counterfeit Monkey and a few other XYZZY Award nominees.
The I7 source available tag on IFDB is helpful here. Some games on that list: Alabaster, Bronze, Blue Lacuna, Child's Play, Fate, Guilded Youth, Hoosegow, Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis, Rover's Day Out, Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom.
Games with source available are neatly tagged at IFDB: http://ifdb.tads.org/search?sortby=ratu&newSortBy.x=-220&newSortBy.y=-194&searchfor=tag%3AI7+source+available
Good call. I've gone ahead and tagged a couple more games that I knew had their source available.
There are also these pages on IFWiki:
http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Free_Software_IF
http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Open_Source_IF