#punyinform

[kawaoneechan]

Story of my life.

I'm working on an interactive fiction thing and wanted to have a help system like in the later Infocom releases. I'm using PunyInform because I want it to run well on Z-Machine v6 at most, and Inform 7 forces v8 or a completely different VM. So I look around. The DM4 has a page about how to implement a menu system that leverages the object tree model, and there's a download on the archive of the same. PunyInform comes with a menu system too but it's not as nice to work with.

Turns out the menu system only supports submenus, text screen options, and toggle options. No "press enter to reveal the next hint" InvisiClues™.

So I implement them myself, as one does. Hint Options, with an array of strings for the individual items as opposed to more objects, a header text, item prefixes, "no more" text...

... and then I find out that because the footnotes in the DM4 are really fucking tiny, I didn't see it mention a pre-made extension that you can find and download that adds hints.

Story of my life.

But I'm pretty sure they don't have anything for header items that appear in bold font and get skipped over when you change your selection.

Like this but with reverse color instead of a > with an explicable cursor block next to it, like in Zork Zero.

[kawaoneechan]

If you have Frotz running on the A3X, you might as well make a small gamelet about the A3X' mascot.

[biscuit-tornado]

The Candy Striper of St. Asterix by improvmonster

A Totally Tubular 80s Text Adventure.

I'm not doing formal interactive fiction reviews, but if you grew up in the 80s, you're going to want to play this for the Walkman experience alone (and enjoy the protag's friend's mixtape, because she has great fucking taste)

Invisiclues™️ included in a separate html file if you get stuck. The parser is reasonably responsive to typical IF verbiage, although there was a section where typical verbs could have had a bit more nudge in their response (e.g., something out of reach in theory is still in scope for PULL/PUSH/TAKE/MOVE, etc.) but that's kinda nitpicking.

characters are pretty 1d but they serve the purpose of driving the story. it's not an indepth character driven piece -- you're on a mission and available TALK TO topics are kind of limited, but give you enough clues to know kind of the outlines of what you need to do. I had to resort to the hints, because of the aforementioned nitpick, but that really wasn't a bummer

recommend, overall. I had a good time in it

[krjpalmer]

Reporting on having managed to get an older compiler for text-based adventure games working with a special library promised to make adventures much older computers wouldn’t choke on provided one more post for this journal. I finished that post, though, aware of an obvious next step but not quite certain if I could manage it before flitting along to some other hobby of the moment...