Text adventures were some of the earliest computer games. A
generation of hackers cut their teeth on ones such as Infocom's
Zork. Graphical games have long since taken over the commercial
games market, but a vibrant independent community has kept text
adventures, also known as interactive fiction, alive. For
example, as many games were written for the 2005 Interactive
Fiction Competition as Infocom wrote in ten years. Want to write
interactive fiction? You're in luck. A lot of work has gone into
tools for doing so. Specialty programming languages such as TADS
and Hugo are designed for the task, and are freely available.
The most popular of these is Inform. The latest version of
Inform, known as Inform 7 or I7, is designed to be easy for
newcomers to use. Let's find out if it really is easy to use. In
this tutorial we'll use I7 to write a simple game. By the time
we're done, you'll have the beginnings of your very own
masterpiece. I7 is a complete design system for interactive
fiction. It's made up of a progra