Getting Started Writing Interactive Fiction

If you're of an, ahem, certain age, you may remember the joy of text adventures: adventure games powered by prose and the player's imagination. The days of “Zork” and “Planetfall” and commercially available text adventures are long gone … but the concept, now known as “Interactive Fiction”, has been reborn around modern tools and a modern community. Where games of the past were simple dungeon romps and puzzle quests, modern games are an interactive equivalent of the short story, complete with characters, conversations, and carefully crafted plots … and lots of room for imagination and “thinking outside the box”.

This session will get you started with the basics of Inform 7: a free, integrated development environment for authoring interactive fiction. You'll see how easy it is to create rooms to visit, objects to examine and manipulate, rules to manage your world, puzzles to solve … even other characters to interact with. Inform 7 is a great way for writers to learn about programming, and programmers to learn about writing … and also a great way to create games if you can write and code, but not draw!

About Howard Lewis Ship

Howard Lewis Ship is the original creator of the Apache Tapestry project, and is a noted expert on Java framework design and developer productivity. He has over twenty years of full-time software development under his belt, with over fifteen years of Java. He cut his teeth writing customer support software for Stratus Computer, but eventually traded PL/1 for Objective-C and NeXTSTEP before settling into Java.

Howard has been developing financial and e-commerce applications in 100% Clojure since 2012.

Howard currently works for Wal-Mart's Global E-Commerce division. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, and his children, Jacob and Olivia.

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