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ES: Somewhat. The band gave me a narrative outline and some sketches of
the setting and characters they were envisioning. The outline had a
lot of detail at the beginning and end, and very little in the
middle; most of the plot twists and mid-game ideas were mine, but the
beginning and endgames were largely theirs, and some of the dialogue GS: Was there a backlash in the IF community, whose participants almost never get paid for their games? ES: If anyone resented this, they were too kind to tell me so. But then, the amount of money involved wasn't large. GS: You have recently contributed heavily to Inform 7, an interactive fiction creating application that makes it even easier for non-programmers to make interaction fiction. So far, have you noticed any fruits for this labour -- ie., new games from non-programmers? ES: Yes -- not many, yet, but the second place winner of IF Comp 2006 was written in Inform 7 by a new author who said that he had not been able to get into IF authorship before. I like to think this isn't a fluke. We've gotten a lot of email from people who have started writing IF for the first time because they find I7 easier to get into, or who have resumed work on old projects that they found too frustrating to complete in previous languages. I7 is also being used with some success in new media courses where college students create their own small IF projects. So it's early yet -- Inform 7 has been out less than a year -- but I think the initial indications are encouraging. GS: Personally, as someone who made a game in an older version of Inform, it makes me feel like I can focus on the experiences and environment of the game without being tripped up by a missing semicolon or something -- however, I've yet to use it. Have other people who have worked in earlier versions of Inform been aided or affected by Inform 7? ES: Reactions have been split. Some authors used to previous versions of
Inform find the new format challenging to get into, because they like
a more program-like style or because they're familiar with the Inform
6 library and don't want the bother of learning to do the same things
in a different way. That's fine -- Inform 6 is still supported, and On the other hand, some have embraced the new version enthusiastically. While it's intended to be accessible to non-programmers, Inform 7 shouldn't be regarded as a beginners' language: it includes some powerful features that were never in I6. I personally find it faster to write in, more flexible in many respects, and considerably more fun. And I'm not the only former I6 author to feel this way. |
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