To be clear, "ZAP-OMNI" is a debug command; it won't be available in the final version of the game. (And I'm skipping over a couple other debug commands I used, to compensate for links in the Antechamber chain that I have not yet implemented.) But "GO TO ANTECHAMBER" will work, just like that, once you have solved all the puzzles in the way. The point of the game is to make those tools available to the player.

So what makes this interesting gameplay? Like I said: puzzles with multiple solutions... and solutions that apply to multiple puzzles. It's no good getting into a room if you've used up the items you needed to have when you got there.

Beyond a certain point in the story, you need to start managing your automated solutions, making sure they all mesh together. That's going to be the real game. And I have now implemented enough of the map to start seeing these effects. Select certain combinations of solutions, and type "GO TO ANTECHAMBER", and the game says (very approximately): "Sorry, you got to the last door and you're stuck, because you've used up the rod of metal X getting that far. Also, when you swam through the flooded tunnel, the Y got soggy and the Z dissolved. Tough beans."

So we go.

Other news: My Unicode Parser for Inform 7, which I mentioned last month, is now available. I also helped get the Inform 6 web site back on line. It's been neglected since I7 came out; then, a few months ago, a server fell over and nobody's had the spare cycles to fix it. The site is still not particularly up to date, but it should now be stable, at least.

My Secret Project for April is not done, but it has reached the major implementation milestone that I was aiming for. I now flip over to the Secret Project for May, aka Secret Project STW-5, which begins... as soon as I upload this post.

In other news... I guess there was PAX East. I was invited to take part in a panel on indie games storytelling -- that was fun. (I don't think it was recorded, though; sorry.) Then there was GDC, but I didn't go to GDC this year. Maybe next year. San Francisco is fun, but expensive, and I didn't want to blow a week of work time.

I also spent a weekend working on a long-term project: allowing Inform 7 to parse commands in other alphabets. It's just a tiny piece of that project, really. I added full Unicode support to the Glulx virtual machine in 2006. In 2010 I added a necessary bit of code to the Inform 6 compiler, allowing it to compile a Unicode-aware dictionary. In 2011 Xun Gong contributed a patch to permit Inform 6 source code in UTF-8. What I'm working on now is upgrading the Inform 7 parser library to use the Unicode-aware dictionary, and accept player commands containing any Unicode text.

(This is a nuisance, because the Inform 7 parser is mostly the same as the Inform 6 parser, which was the Inform 5 parser, which was way back in the 90s and presumed without thinking that a letter fits in one 8-bit byte. So now I'm fixing up byte arrays into long-word arrays everywhere. Boring, not too hard, but not done yet.)

(No, I'm not using UTF-8 arrays. Don't get me started. Never do text manipulation in UTF-8. It only wastes your time and annoys the warthog.)

This is not the last piece of the puzzle. We'll still need the Inform 7 compiler to understand Unicode vocabulary terms. (Right now it assumes that its parser is not capable of that, so it rejects such vocabulary out of hand.) And finally we'll need full non-English parser libraries! We have such things for some European languages that use the Latin alphabet. In fact right now somebody is working through a Japanese IF parser that uses Romaji. But these ought to be expanded to other alphabets, and I, as an utter monolinguat, cannot help much with that problem.

So I don't expect I7 to support non-English IF very soon. But I have my piece to finish, and every step on this road is good.

I have a Secret Project for April, and a completely different Secret Project for May. The May project will be my reward for finishing the April project. One secret project at a time, I promise -- I can only split my time so many ways.

Happy Spring, unless you're a Southerner. Happy April 1, which is not yet started as I write this. Good luck with the silly Internet foolery tomorrow.

Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home, my space-opera fairy tale, now joins Shade in the iOS App Store. As with Shade, I've added some illustrations for this iOS port. The art doesn't change the game, but it might make the important aspects of the ship's status easier to grasp.

If you're not familiar with Heliopause, it's a tiny little game that I wrote for @party a couple of years ago. It was inspired by my desire to stretch the traditional time-and-space scale of interactive fiction -- to deal with solar systems and centuries, rather than hand-held objects and minutes. It was also inspired by old pulp and New Wave sci-fi. (Count the literary references!)

Myrmidal is the queen of the bright worlds, and you've walked her million cities beneath her sky and beyond it. Myrmidal laughs and Myrmidal dances; they say no one weeps on Myrmidal, except for moments on the stage.

But even on Myrmidal the sun rises and sets, and the music grows tinny and harsh when you weary of dancing. Your best stories and your best lies draw the same fond laughter. This morning you decide to rise to the docks, and rouse your Horizon of Night from her sleep, and raise her sails. Somewhere are worlds you have never seen. And if your friends miss you at the dance, they can tell you so when you return.

(-- Heliopause, opening)

Related to this note, a new interview with me at Gamasutra, posted (and hosted) by Leigh Alexander. We talk about Shade, Heliopause, and how I think IF works on the small-and-touchy screen.

Over on the purely graphical end of the adventure-game spectrum, I'll note the release of Dagon, a framework for building first-person anamorphic-panning games. (This is the UI style of Myst 3, and of course many other games.)

Dagon is the framework build by Agustín Cordes for his upcoming game Asylum. You may remember the Asylum teaser demo from last summer; if not, it's worth a look. The Dagon scripts for the teaser are included with the download, so you can see how the system works.

Asylum is currently in the middle of a Kickstarter push -- they're 75% of the way to their (ambitious) goal. Kudos to Agustín for pushing out the open-source framework before the game's funding is assured. I hope it helps him hit the mark.

Next on the news list: Emily Short's secret project, which she and Richard Evans have been working on since before they got themselves acquired by Linden Labs.

Versu is an engine for choice-based, conversation-focussed narrative fiction. It is currently available as an iPad app; support for more platforms is planned. What you get right now is a free download with a tutorial, a short adaptation of a scene from Pride and Prejudice, and a longer ("30-45 minute") Gothic-ish story. For $5, you can buy an additional story about a polite family dinner party that turns to... well, I shouldn't spoil it, should I?

I started to write about this thing, but it grew into a full-on review. So I am cutting that loose to be its own post. Up next on the Gameshelf!

But first, the last of today's releases: Depression Quest, a choice-based indie release by Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey, and Isaac Schankler.

You are a normal person, with a normal job, and a normal girlfriend, and a -- perhaps normal -- lousy feedback loop between your thoughts, your habits, and your biochemistry. Which is to say: depression. You play through a few months of your life, with simple illustrations and a placid, sombre soundtrack. Your decisions all suck.

This is the sort of bleed-on-the-page writing (and game design) which would be mawkishly simplistic if it weren't real, but it is real. You can smell that, even if you don't have depressive tendencies yourself. (I do, as anyone could tell you who knows my preference for writing code in a room with the shades drawn. All week.) If you don't believe that some people are like this, you need to play the game, and pay attention.

Depression Quest is built on Twine. It's exactly the sort of simple graph-based plot that Versu isn't. (Whoops! You haven't read the Versu post yet. Context ordering failure! Well, we'll get back to it.) Look: DQ isn't about its gameplay. The mechanics are simplistic and limiting, and that's the point, right? To underscore the point, half the options are blocked off in any given scene. This has been done before (Rameses is famous in the IF community), but it still works.

Several months ago I played Papo & Yo, which is a similarly honest game. Anna Anthropy's Dys4ia is also coming up in many people's comparisons. Notice how different all of those games are?

I hope nobody thinks that this is "dreary games about life sucking". (We've got the regular game industry for that, right? From Space Invaders to Missile Command, and then an infinity of games about war?) No: this is people communicating their lives, and choosing the interactive medias to do it. We must have this if anything called "game design" is to have a lasting impact. That is all.

I'm not sure how much more I want to say about Depression Quest. It is a free browser-based game. The author is accepting pay-what-you-want donations, of which a portion go to iFred, a education and research organization. (I had trouble with the donation button, so I dropped money directly on iFred. Zoe, if we ever meet up in real life, I owe you a beverage.)

Rather than waft more of my own sentiments around, I will just quote from the game's introduction:

Depression Quest is a game that deals with living with depression in a very literal way. This game is not meant to be a fun or lighthearted experience. If you are currently suffering from the illness and are easily triggered, please be aware that this game uses stark depictions of people in very dark places. If you are suicidal, please stop playing this game and visit this link to talk to someone. [...]

It goes without saying that because of the very nature of depression, it is experienced differently by every person who suffers from it. We aren't trying to say that this is the "best" or "most accurate" representation, merely that this is an amalgamation of the experiences of the developers and several people close to them. Many of the following encounters deal with issues such as therapy, medication, handling a love life, and reaching out to support networks. In reality, less than half of depression sufferers actually seek treatment, for reasons such as lack of money, perceived personal failing, or public stigma. [...]

We've written it this way so that we can focus specifically on the illness, which becomes more and more difficult to deal with as the person who has it is less and less well-off.

(-- Depression Quest, opening)

Last month I alluded to design problems with duplicated objects in the game. (That is, what happens if you try to create two doses of some compound, when the game is only set up for one.) Conclusion: I punt on this. The game will flat-out refuse to let you do it. If you try, it mysteriously fails.

You might think this is the cheap way out -- but it will work, and I can fit it into the overall mystery of the game. Trust me, every game design involves taking the cheap way out of some problems. You pick your battles, and this one is not mine.

(My motto at this point is: "This game already had enough scope creep in 2011, never mind 2012. The screws are officially on.")

Yes, there was a spot where the plot required two doses of a particular compound. Not any more. Now there's compound X and compound X-prime, with different names, and you can substitute one for the other. Implemented, ritual variation tested, problem solved.

Otherwise, I have slowly been stitching the map together. It now has many doors, and some of them are locked (or otherwise impassable). Some of these doors have keys (or other door-passing items). The puzzle-blockage pattern is no by means complete, but it's filling in.

As it happens, I didn't spend today on doors; I spent it on little bits of paper. I already had a mechanism for learning rituals, and recalling what you've learned, but it wasn't hooked into actual game objects -- the pieces of paper which you pick up and read. (You may recall one such from the teaser.) Now that's all put together.

(Except for the part where you get vindictive and set the paper on fire. You never need to do this, but hey, I'm not going to stop you... Should just be a few minutes of work.)

(In fact... there. I just did it. Behold the power of this fully operational environmental rulebook system.)

Okay, enough showing off. Plans for February: continue stringing together doors, door-goals, and paths through the goal-planning system.

I will also do another iOS release of one of my old games. Where Dreamhold had a dynamic map, and Shade had a rendering of the game's "to do" list, Heliopause will have a nifty display of your starship and its magnetic sails. Here, have a parting screenshot:

See, in this game you can make things. Say, a gonk potion. But then maybe you try to make another gonk potion. I have only implemented one gonk-potion object, so this is a problem. Right now I have a bunch of comments in my code saying "TODO: check if you already have one", and the reason they're still TODO comments is that I don't really like any of the solutions.

In some cases, you can't make more than one gonk potion because there's only one batch of gonk ingredients. Great -- but that leaves all the other cases. (Indeed, some puzzles revolve around finding a second batch of gonk-foo.)

I could have the game flat-out refuse. "You already have a perfectly good gonk potion!" Well, sure, but it's pretty embarrassing to refuse when the player has just gone through this elaborate gonk ritual and is tipping in the last ingredient. Besides, what if the player really wants two gonk potions? The plot is set up so that you don't ever really need two of the same thing at the same time... but the player doesn't know that.

I could add a second gonk-potion object -- but then what if the player makes three? Besides, the Inform parser isn't terrific at handling multiple identical objects. It can do it, but I'd rather not subject the player to that in an already-object-heavy game. For added fun, as I mentioned last month, the game supports "CREATE GONK POTION" even when the thing is nowhere in sight. If there were two of them waiting off-stage... "Which do you want to create, the gonk potion or the gonk potion?"

There are ways around this, but what this game does not need is another layer of abstraction strapped on. So I need to come up with something clever. And I need to come up with it soon, because today I looked at my notes and realized the plot does need two gonk potions to exist at the same time. In one specific case. Dammit.

I would say "That's the plan for January!" but January is also going to be holiday lunacy, it looks like. (Also, it's already 6% over.) I've got a couple of non-game-related things I need to update this month, and then we run into the MIT Mystery Hunt -- the event of the year for any puzzle-person in the Boston area. (Or, really, the US.) I don't do the Hunt every year; I skipped it last year, for reasons of personal sanity. This year, I'm in. Can't apologize for that.

So, the HL plan for January is to make as much progress as I can on the map's puzzle structure. And think about the plurality problem. I will report back at the end of the month.

In other recent IF news...

Emily Short has released Counterfeit Monkey, a gigantic IF game with a word-puzzle theme. I have played just the first few minutes of it, so all I can tell you is this: you start the game with a full-alphabet letter-remover.

SPAG, the online magazine of interactive fiction, is back from hiatus with a new web site, a new editor, and a new issue. Dannii Willis (known to the community for Parchment and other IF services) has refocused the zine and pulled together a sterling set of interviews and articles.

Activision has re-released their Lost Treasures of Infocom collection for iOS. (Zork 1 is playable for free, the rest of the games are a $10 in-app purchase.) I could devote a good half-post to its good and bad points, but this isn't the place. Let's just say: lotta playable games, complete with maps, invisiclues, and scans of the docs and feelies.

I feel like I should do a retrospective of my work in 2012, but you've been reading the posts, right? I released two short new games, wrote a whole lot of code, updated several libraries, got my iOS IF framework up to speed, and shipped Pocket Storm. Made a lot of cookies and didn't exercise enough. There, retrospected.

In 2013, I need to... well. Keep working on Hadean Lands. That's easy.

I need to get Shade and Heliopause back off the shelf, and ship them as iOS apps. If I have a business plan as an indie developer (which you might reasonably doubt), it is to get a bunch of quirky apps out and see if any of them are successful. IF apps are on that list. So is the set of word puzzles I've been keeping in my pocket for the past year or so. And maybe another Boodler-based audio project. Or the nano-clockwork puzzle idea?

We shall see.

Happy already-begun year, everybody.

The "pretty much finished" qualifier is because I haven't polished the output of this module yet. I type "CREATE IONIZER", and the game replies:

You open the beta-door.
You make your way to the Maze-Alpha.
You take the phaser.
You shot the alien!
You make your way to the Maze-Delta.
You take the ion widget.
You tinker together an ionizer.

This is perfectly readable but it's inelegant. I'd rather display this in paragraph form, skipping the less-important details:

"You open the beta-door, shoot the alien, take the
ion widget, and tinker together an ionizer."

Stitching together sentence fragments in I7 is moderately tedious. The mutable-string operations you expect in a modern language are possible in I7, but inefficient. (The leaden weight of Inform's history, which dates back to Infocom's Z-machine, which had no dynamic allocation at all). So I prefer to avoid that and instead muck around with a lot of state variables: have we just had a period or a comma? Hokay, capital letter time. Tedious. Not difficult. I'll get it set up eventually.

All of that business with the ionizer and the phaser is a test case, of course. The system works for the actual game objects too, and I have a bunch of those implemented. But since none of the game locations exist, I can't finish those shortcut rules yet.

Thus, the goal for December: create the map. Scary! Of course I've had a map drawn out for months, but it's slightly abstracted. (I may wind up splitting some rooms to improve the pacing, for example.) And a lot of the less-critical game objects are vaguely labelled "in quarters" or "in one of the labs" -- these are things which are easy to find, but the exact location is a matter of pacing, not puzzle gating. So I haven't nailed them down yet.

December will be a month of nailing. Hopefully by New Year's Eve, I will have an actual game structure to walk around -- rooms, locked doors, and puzzle barriers. There won't be any descriptions or game text; that will take much longer. But, even walking around the house-of-cards will be exciting.

I have another secret IF-ish project which should appear December as well. It's very small, but hopefully will amuse some people. More news when it's less secret.

Non-HL news: I released Pocket Storm! A meditative, procedurally-generated thunderstorm for your iPhone. (Based, as you might expect, on the Boodler sound engine.) I was also an exhibitor at the Boston Festival of Indie Games, where I stood and demoed Shade and Meanwhile for eight hours straight. Whew. (See blog post.)

On the technical side: this month I got the iOS Glulx interpreter polished up. Previously I had the iOS Z-machine interpreter working -- that's what I used to release Dreamhold. However, Hadean Lands will be well beyond the Z-machine's capabilities. (It already is, in fact.) Most of the iOS porting work needed for the Glulx interpreter was either easy or identical to the Z-machine work... but the last few percent was a bear, of course. The bear is now placidly licking honey from its paws.You can see the result (if you're into iOS source code) on GitHub.

This brings up a question, though. The same week I posted that source code, Apple released the iPhone 5. It also updated its development environment to support it -- but the oldest iOS devices are now not supported. (The original iPhone, iPhone 3G, and the first and second-gen iPod touch.) I believe it's still possible to build an app that's universal across all iOS devices, but it requires some finicky command-line work across two different sets of dev tools.

Does anybody care? When I launched this Kickstarter thing, the iPhone 4 was brand-new and plenty of people were still on older models. (I still had an original iPhone.) I intended to support all models; the interpreter code I've posted does support all models. (Albeit letterboxed on the iPhone 5.)

Obviously, time has passed. You don't need me to remind you of that. If I release the game with minimum specs of "iPhone 3GS and iOS 4.3", will that leave you out in the cold? Let me know. I am willing to do the extra work for back-support, but only if it benefits real people.

(Let's not get into the "Apple hates everybody" rat-hole. There are blogs for that. The situation is what it is, I have to decide how to exist in it.)

For October, I intend to design a major new subsystem for HL: shortcut actions. Enacting a detailed alchemical ritual is fun -- the first time. The second time, it's grinding; you'd really rather just type "create potion of foo". So I will support that! ...As long as you have access to all the ingredients. ...Some of which require other rituals to create. And -- this is the hard part -- without accidentally introducing any new solutions.

Yeah, headache. See you in a month.

I did not get much chance to look around the rest of the show, because I was standing and demoing for eight hours. That laptop in front of me? Didn't open it once. I thought I would be able to work on some HL code during slack time in the show. Ha ha.

But I could see some very nifty first-person 3D exploration games running across the room, and hear the shrieks of Conway's Inferno. (All my puzzle friends noted Conway's Inferno as a clear puzzle hit; I agree. When the iOS version ships, buy it.) And I got a few minutes to chat with Jason Scott before he showed his movie. I hear Peter Molyneux dropped by, but if I saw him, I didn't know it.

I did not win one of the show awards, which were voted by the crowds. (Didn't expect to.) You can see Shade got a string of yellow dots -- votes for "best narrative" -- although, to be fair, I think a couple of people were voting for Meanwhile. I don't see the winner list posted, but I know that the Best Narrative trophy went to Resonance, so congrats to Wadjet Eye.

Conclusion: this festival was a big success. It was an excellent way for crazy small-time developers like me to show off games, talk to people, and generally demonstrate our existence. Many people tried my games; more people watched the documentaries. I pushed the PR-IF link on anybody who expressed an interest in IF, so I expect we'll have a packed meeting in October. (Not yet scheduled, sorry.)

The show will happen again; it will be bigger next year. If you're a game maker in the New England area, and you're not big enough to set up a gigantic booth at PAX or GDC, you want to be at BostonFIG in 2013. I will be.

Boodler is an open-source soundscape project which I invented years ago. Boodler is designed for any kind of complex audio environment -- weather, traffic, alien worlds -- but I've never developed it as it really deserves. The Pocket Storm is my first attempt to bring Boodler to a consumer audience.

Rather than trying to sell a complete "Boodler for iPhone" app, I'm taking the approach of do one thing, very well. So Pocket Storm is a one-hour thunderstorm, which plays as background audio. Or you can stream it to AirPlay. You can set the timing as desired, or adjust the weather manually. There's also a timer option, if you want to go to sleep to it.

Audio samples from Pocket Storm, at different stages, are posted on the web site.

Owen Williams created the first Boodler thunderstorm soundscape, more than a decade ago. My app doesn't use his code, though, nor the old Boodler sound samples. I've built an all-new thunderstorm -- or rather, a set of thunderstorm variations -- using sounds from the Freesound.org project.

The sound libraries that I've compiled for Pocket Storm are now posted on the Boodler web site. (They're all Creative Commons Attribution, Sampling Plus, and Zero licenses.) The agents (source code) that assemble the sounds are not currently available; as usual, I'm trying to find a balance between open-source work and secret sauce. But you are, of course, welcome to compose your own Boodler thunderstorms from these sounds, or use Owen's original.

(Speaking of which: a percentage of the App Store revenue from Pocket Storm will be donated to the Freesound project.)

Quick example (you want a quick example, don't you?): the general command is "BURN X WITH Y". (There are many synonyms, of course.) So I set up a rulebook, and start filling it in with both general and specific rules.

• burn (hardwood) with (burning softwood): The fire isn't hot enough for the hardwood to catch.
• burn (softwood) with (burning magnesium): The wood burns away instantly.
• burn (burning magnesium) with (burning softwood): The wood burns away instantly.
• burn (wood) with (anything burning): The wood catches fire.
• burn (anything burning) with (anything burning): "That's already on fire."
• burn (anything) with (anything burning): "Randomly settings things on fire won't help."

These are not straight out of the game -- I don't really have magnesium -- but they give you the idea. It doesn't matter that some of these rules overlap; I7 arranges them from most specific to most general, and finds the first one that covers the situation. This means that I can start with some broad cases, and then add details until I'm satisfied. I don't need to plan the whole matrix from the beginning.

Which is good, because there's no way to think of all this stuff from the beginning. That case of "BURN FLAMING MAGNESIUM WITH BURNING SOFTWOOD"? I didn't realize until I tried it that it needed its own case. Sure, I could have let the "already on fire" case cover it -- but that wouldn't be satisfying.

(Then I built the retort, which has a sort of bunsen-burner arrangement, and realized that requires a whole new set of mechanisms. That took four days right there.)

Anyway, that's the war stories for August. What's up for September: a lot of little mechanisms and transformations which are needed for puzzle-solving, even though they're not rituals in their own right. For example, drawing a gold bead out into gold wire. Or jumping into a pool, and finding that all your possessions get soaked. (I'd say this is the easy stuff, but, well, liquids and fire. They're always extra work. Stay tuned for more war stories.)

In non-IF news: keep an eye out for another secret iPhone project! It should hit the App Store next week. This is an audio project, and if you're a long-time follower of my work, you might be able to guess which audio project.

The ritual engine has been the fun part. Of course I've already implemented a version of this, for the Hadean Lands teaser that I posted with the original Kickstarter project. But that was built to handle just one ritual (ignoring the starting "lamp" puzzle, which is a one-off set of actions). Generalizing it to support the giant branching ritual tree I've got in my notes -- that's what we call fun. But I've got three rituals in there now, and they all work, so I must have gotten it right.

To make sure I've gotten it right, I built a little unit-testing script. (One can eyeball code for three rituals, but in the course of the next umpty-um rituals, mistakes will be made. I can smell 'em coming.) It's just a bit of Python hooked up to an interpreter -- I wrote the whole thing this afternoon. But for every ritual, I can now write down a list of commands and the expected outcomes (following the engine's state machine). Plus, I can write down a list for every way to do a ritual wrong, and all of those expected outcomes. (Interesting, informative failures are key to interesting IF.)

(For I7 experts: yes, this is similar in nature to the I7 Skein facility. However, I've never had good luck with the skein -- whenever I try to use it, the IDE eats my data. So I wrote my own thing. Yes, it is a personal failing. But my script is nicely tuned for HL, and more compact, and it's also easier to check into Git, so there.)

And the secret project? I won't lie -- it's not IF-related. It was a wild idea that popped up early in the month, when WWDC was coming up and everybody was agog with rumors about an SDK for AppleTV apps. It was a good idea. More importantly, I could have finished it fast, submitted it, and been one of the first apps in its category in the new AppleTV App Store.

As a developer, I have to pay attention to those sorts of opportunities. I am obligated to finish HL, but I am also obligated to keep an eye out for other paths to success. So I spent a few days on the Secret Project, and no apologies.

Well, WWDC went by and those rumors -- turned out to be rumors. Tim Cook didn't say a word about AppleTV apps. No SDK, no AppleTV App Store. So the Secret Project is back on the shelf, and I've been back on HL.

I do intend to finish the Secret Project, for iPhone. It's still a good idea! But in the iOS App Store it will be about the hundredth app in its category, and there's no advantage to finishing it right now. That makes it lower priority than the IF work. Maybe by the end of the summer, I'll get it done.

I should also mention another Secret Project, on which I spent no time at all, because it wasn't mine. Jason McIntosh has just released an iOS version of The Warbler's Nest, his short award-winning IF work from 2010. Jason is the first IF author to pick up my IosFizmo framework. (The first one who isn't, you know, me.) If you haven't played The Warbler's Nest, and you have an iPhone/iPod/iPad, drop a buck on it. Jason's cat needs kibble.

First, this Z-code interpreter (an iOS port of Fizmo) is available on GitHub now. Do you have a Z-code game that you want to put in the App Store? Now you can. (I mean, when the bug is squashed.) Free or for money, it shouldn't be a problem either way.

(You'll have to be a registered iOS developer, though. Also, I haven't documented the build process in any useful way -- sorry. This will improve over time. For the present, just install the project and its submodules from GitHub, replace Game.z5, and fire up Xcode.)

Some answers for the IF author contemplating an App Store release:

• Can I customize the display style?

Yes. I put in hooks for game-specific fonts and color schemes.

• What about that awesome map?

The map is Dreamhold-specific, so it's not included in the interpreter release. The same goes for the Game Center achievements. I think I'm going to keep those as private extensions. (I'm pretending to do this for a living, so I have to have some kind of, whaddayacall, "value add".)

If you're good at iOS coding, you are of course free to write your own interpreter customizations. The source is under a BSD-style license.

• Is this a fully functional Z-code interpreter?

Urm, mostly. It only handles V5 and V8 at this time. (The V3 status line code might work, but is untested.) Timed input works, but the color opcodes do not. There are undoubtedly some bugs -- I know the status line height can go wonky at startup in some games. (Fortunately not Dreamhold! I know what's going on with this bug, I just haven't gotten around to it yet.)

• What about Glulx? (Hadean Lands will be a Glulx game, after all.)

I have most of the Glulx interpreter working (see iosglulxe), but it's missing one key feature -- the ability to launch the game where you left off. This is critical for iOS, obviously. Follow my GitHub progress to see when that's ready.

• Can anybody use this? What if someone goes and posts all of your IF on the App Store?

The App Store has a lot of cloning and shovelware floating by. This is a sad fact of the app world. It is possible that somebody could take this opportunity to flood the world with games using my name -- or, for that matter, start uploading the entire IF Archive.

I hope that doesn't happen, though. I would like to build up a small selection of Zarf IF games on the App Store, both free and for-money, with nice game-specific bonus features. That would be good for the Zarfhome label.

(I have nothing against iOS Frotz, which is awesome -- it's not an app that features particular games. Flooding the App Store search results with a bunch of cloned IF is entirely different.)

(Note: if you are this sort of shovelware bozo, and you're posting other people's games from the Archive for free, you're a bozo. If you do it for money, or put ads on, you're a bozo who is probably violating a bunch of software licenses. All my games say "Do not distribute commercially without permission," for example. Don't go there.)

Well, we'll see what happens, right? Enough of that mess.

• And Hadean Lands?

I turned Dreamhold over to the App Store review queue a week ago. Since then, I've been chewing through the pile of HL design documents that have been accumulating for the past oh-so-many months.

I now have a complete picture of the puzzle structure -- every ritual and special action, major and minor. It's... somewhat terrifying. Remember I said "53 major puzzles"? It's up to 72 now. There are 98 distinct spell components on the list.

Inform's parser isn't really optimized for carrying around 98 objects. I mean, you can't actually carry all 98 at once, because some of them are made from each other. But it's still way too many. Inform allows it, but I suspect the parsing will bog down on slower machines -- like phones.

But then, why should the player have to do all that inventory management at all? Expect a lot of attention to shortcuts and automatic object-fetching. "You run over to Herbarium and pick some rosemary..."

Anyhow, the next step will be typing all of these puzzles and components into PlotEx, to make sure I haven't completely broken the plot. (I'm sure the first thing I'll discover is that PlotEx isn't optimized for 98 objects either, and then there will be some more optimization. Whee!)

After that? My usual IF implementation strategy is "start with the first room, work forward until done." That is absolutely not going to work here. What will I do instead? Stay tuned...

A couple of other IF-related links from the past month:

The Bundle in a Box charity promotion is offering seven Windows adventure games in a pay-what-you-choose bundle. This includes six graphical adventures (by Jonas Kyratzes, Wadjet Eye Games, and Size Five Games) and one text game: Peter Nepstad's 1893: A World's Fair Mystery. Proceeds support indie developers and charitable causes.

Is it time for a text game revival? (Gamasutra article by Leigh Alexander.) Runs through several sorts of text-based games, from Infocom's heyday to modern e-literature, the Kickstarter revival of many old fan favorites, Emily Short's new project at Linden Labs, and so on. Includes the splash banner for Hadean Lands, so I'm in favor.

Interactive Fiction Communities: From Preservation through Promotion and Beyond (Article by Nick Montfort and Emily Short.) Introduction to IF (which I'm sure you don't need) but also a history of the genre and the community, in some detail. Worth reading if you haven't been immersed in the stuff for the past few decades.

I started writing this a full year ago, and I got the basics of an IF interface working: the status window, the story window, text input, scrolling. But I put it aside in the spring -- I wanted to get Secret Hideout and Meanwhile out the door. Now that HL is in progress, I decided to make sure the interface was up to snuff.

Turns out I made some mistakes back then; it was, after all, nearly my first iOS project. (Alas, poor KLD.) So the past couple of weeks have been spent ripping out inadequate code and hammering on it. If you follow my twitter feed, you'll have gotten some hints of this. Text scrolling is no longer stupid. The "more" flag works. The threading model is no longer a disaster waiting to happen. Also, I have a nice preferences menu for fonts and colors.

The biggest chunk of work remaining is to save and restore properly. The IF system that I'm using goes back to Infocom's design, which saved and restored the game only when the player typed "save" and "restore". There was no notion of the modern app world, which barely acknowledges that programs start and stop at all -- an app is expected to have your data ready the moment you look at it. This is possible in IF (iOS Frotz does it), but I've never integrated the feature into my own IF toolset. That'll be the big job for after GDC.

Anyhow, here's an interpreter snapshot, running my 2004 game The Dreamhold. Not fancy, but think ebook reader -- you want the UI to get out of the way of the text, not to distract from it. It still needs some icon work, mind you, and the menus are ugly. Not done yet; but greatly improved.

(IF mavens will note that The Dreamhold is a Z-code game, whereas Hadean Lands will be Glulx. True! The interpreter you see here is based on Fizmo, a Z-code interpreter. But nearly all of the interface code will be shared with the iOS Glulx app. The text windows, input, scrolling, menus, and so on are exactly the same.)

Now, this interpreter will certainly be finished before the game. (Sorry!) My plan is to release The Dreamhold as a free iOS app. I'm aiming to do that in early April, although that's not a firm date. I want to get the interpreter out there, both for real-life testing and for some eyeballs (in the "never heard of IF but what's this free app?" camp).

After that? Well, once the interpreter is done, it will be easy for me to release the rest of my existing IF catalog. They might be free apps, or I might charge a few dollars. Of course these games are available for free now, in iOS Frotz! So I'm not going to put the screws on. Maybe I'll add a little bonus content. You know the drill. Not life-changing work, but if it makes some money, it'll aid the cause.

Furthermore, anybody will be able to release an IF game using the same interpreter. Everything I've got is posted on my Github page. (The IF interface library is iosglk; the interpreters are iosfizmo and iosglulxe. Yes, iosglulxe is a couple of weeks behind.)

And Hadean Lands will follow, eventually, on a date to be announced.