4 ms·

I’m so bummed I missed the golden age of text based games. I can describe things but can’t draw them to save my life.

LeoPanthera 3y ago
For what it's worth, there's a small but very dedicated group of IF fans still. Check out: https://ifdb.org https://ifdb.org https://ifcomp.org https://ifcomp.org
- elliotpo 3y ago
  thank you for this
mysterydip 3y ago
Still going strong as a niche. Lots of good tools nowadays. Why not give it a go? And coincidentally this book just released. I got the PDF version and am loving it: https://if50.textories.com/#buy https://if50.textories.com/#buy
- logicprog 3y ago
  > Lots of good tools nowadays. Inform 7 has kinda "won" by popularity, for obscure historical reasons (you can read The Digital Antiquarian's "Teaching the Old Z-Machine New Tricks" series to see what exactly happened to make Inform so dominant), so on a first search that's the tool you're most likely to find, but I just want to plug TADS 3 for anyone interested in interactive fiction development. Inform is interesting, especially in concept, but it has a huge amount of very serious drawbacks due to its extremely static nature (no dynamic allocation, no creating lists on the fly and appending to them, etc), lack of general programming constructs, and "natural language" syntax, whereas TADS 3 is actually a very excellent little language that's got all the modern amenities and is just a joy to write games in, and has a simply shockingly powerful standard library / world model. TADS 3 feels like Ruby/Smalltalk had a baby with C and it specialized in IF. Also, try the adv3Lite library instead of the default standard library — the name is a bit of a misnomer, as it's just as complete as the default one, it just has superior design sensibilities and a huge host of new features stolen from Inform. Adv3Lite adds basically everything thay was good about Inform 7 to TADS 3.
  - anthk 3y ago
    I prefer Inform6, a dumb as hell OOP language but you can go to "low level" stuff in order to implement things. Also, it has Spanish support thru infsp6, which is my native language.
    - logicprog 3y ago
      Nice! Yeah Inform 6 is still solid. TADS 3 is more like it than 7.
em-bee 3y ago
besides interactive fiction there are also many MUDs still going. https://mudlistings.com/ https://mudlistings.com/ has a section, which MUDs are looking for builders and writers
logicprog 3y ago
Like the other reply to your post said, there is a small but very dedicated, active and most of all supportive interactive fiction community still regularly making very well-made and interesting literary works, as well as producing new development tools, and we would love to have you! There's even a yearly competition for short interactive fiction that you can submit to if you don't want your work to go completely unnoticed. I really can't stress enough how supportive and engaged and surprisingly active this community is — you wouldn't think it possible for a genre that has been officially dead for so many years, but somehow the community has kept going, producing works of really substantial worth and inventiveness that are genuinely sometimes even better than what was produced when the genre was officially alive. Many of them very long and complex, too. I highly recommend you check out IFDB, check the tags for parser (I find parser IF in the general tradition of Infocom much more interesting and impressive than hypertext, since there's am actual world model and stuff there) and "long-form." You'll see some impressive stuff. You should also check out https://intfiction.org https://intfiction.org, it's a very friendly community forum for discussing interactive fiction reviews, design, and development, and it's shockingly active — I've posted there a few times and always got several replies, and there's always people talking there.

For what it's worth, there's a small but very dedicated group of IF fans still. Check out: https://ifdb.org https://ifdb.org https://ifcomp.org https://ifcomp.org

elliotpo 3y ago
thank you for this

mysterydip 3y ago

Still going strong as a niche. Lots of good tools nowadays. Why not give it a go? And coincidentally this book just released. I got the PDF version and am loving it: https://if50.textories.com/#buy https://if50.textories.com/#buy

logicprog 3y ago
> Lots of good tools nowadays. Inform 7 has kinda "won" by popularity, for obscure historical reasons (you can read The Digital Antiquarian's "Teaching the Old Z-Machine New Tricks" series to see what exactly happened to make Inform so dominant), so on a first search that's the tool you're most likely to find, but I just want to plug TADS 3 for anyone interested in interactive fiction development. Inform is interesting, especially in concept, but it has a huge amount of very serious drawbacks due to its extremely static nature (no dynamic allocation, no creating lists on the fly and appending to them, etc), lack of general programming constructs, and "natural language" syntax, whereas TADS 3 is actually a very excellent little language that's got all the modern amenities and is just a joy to write games in, and has a simply shockingly powerful standard library / world model. TADS 3 feels like Ruby/Smalltalk had a baby with C and it specialized in IF. Also, try the adv3Lite library instead of the default standard library — the name is a bit of a misnomer, as it's just as complete as the default one, it just has superior design sensibilities and a huge host of new features stolen from Inform. Adv3Lite adds basically everything thay was good about Inform 7 to TADS 3.
- anthk 3y ago
  I prefer Inform6, a dumb as hell OOP language but you can go to "low level" stuff in order to implement things. Also, it has Spanish support thru infsp6, which is my native language.
  - logicprog 3y ago
    Nice! Yeah Inform 6 is still solid. TADS 3 is more like it than 7.

em-bee 3y ago

besides interactive fiction there are also many MUDs still going. https://mudlistings.com/ https://mudlistings.com/ has a section, which MUDs are looking for builders and writers

logicprog 3y ago

Like the other reply to your post said, there is a small but very dedicated, active and most of all supportive interactive fiction community still regularly making very well-made and interesting literary works, as well as producing new development tools, and we would love to have you! There's even a yearly competition for short interactive fiction that you can submit to if you don't want your work to go completely unnoticed. I really can't stress enough how supportive and engaged and surprisingly active this community is — you wouldn't think it possible for a genre that has been officially dead for so many years, but somehow the community has kept going, producing works of really substantial worth and inventiveness that are genuinely sometimes even better than what was produced when the genre was officially alive. Many of them very long and complex, too. I highly recommend you check out IFDB, check the tags for parser (I find parser IF in the general tradition of Infocom much more interesting and impressive than hypertext, since there's am actual world model and stuff there) and "long-form." You'll see some impressive stuff. You should also check out https://intfiction.org https://intfiction.org, it's a very friendly community forum for discussing interactive fiction reviews, design, and development, and it's shockingly active — I've posted there a few times and always got several replies, and there's always people talking there.