Dark Forest Crow Notes - Interactive fiction, text-interactions based and roleplaying games

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Overview of interactive fiction frameworks #3: Inform6


Our glorious jorney into amazing world of interactive fiction development tools and frameworks continues. Twine and Inform7 have fallen. Who is next?

Psypoke or Slowduck? Wtf?

Inform6. Yeah, Inform6, a father of Inform7.

Guess what, folks, Inform6 is better than Inform7 in many aspects, but still there is no reasons to use it. That's why this article is so short. Main things are here:

- Inform6 is an object-oriented programming language. Yeah, it's not like Inform7 which targets writers who knows nothing about software development.

- It's an old tool but guys like DavidKinder still support it. But, actually, they are all focused on Inform7 now.

- It has the same power as Inform7. Key features of Inform6 and Inform7 are almost the same.

- Inform6 code is more readable than pseudoenglish of Inform7 and actually does what you ask. I think Inform7 made a step back in this aspect. Guys are trying to get new audience or non-programmers.

That's all.

So, should you use Inform6?

If you are a writer who doesn't want to waste your time to learn programming language to create your simple games - use Inform7 or even Twine. 

If you are a software developer then you definetly don't need to learn yet another old and specific programming language to create your game. This tool was doing it's job well in the past. Now it's days are over, let's say 'thank you' and forget about it.

Again, list of good tutorials for those who still want to try Inform6:


I hope you will not use it.

As a bonus, take a look at the example of Inform6 source code with some definitions:

  Object Kitchen "Kitchen";
  Object Front_Door "Front Door";

  Object Living_Room "Living Room"
      with
          description "A comfortably furnished living room.",
          n_to Kitchen,
          s_to Front_Door,
      has light;

  Object -> -> Briefcase "briefcase"
      with
          name 'briefcase' 'case',
          description "A slightly worn, black briefcase.",
      has container;

Not that bad.

Enjoyable post is coming very soon.

No comments:

Post a Comment