So I wrote a little interactive fiction game for class a few months ago and am putting it up here for those who wish to inflict my shoddy game design abilities upon themselves :)
If you’re not familiar with IF, they are basically games that just use text (and your imagination) to convey their game world to the player. The classic example is Zork but over the past few years there’s been something of a renaissance in IF with some pretty interesting titles like Galatea and Photopia (which was seriously the most moving game I’ve ever played).
A big part of the renaissance is due to the Inform7 programming language used by most IF games. Inform is a powerful language for creating IF and tries to be as close to a natural language as possible. It’s a great example of the power and limitations of the natural approach.
If you haven’t seen it before, here’s a (slightly morbid) snippet from my code:
The Black Knight is a man in the Dark Forest. The Black Knight has a number called current body pieces. The current body pieces of the Black Knight is 4.
I’m not going to bother explaining it since you can probably figure out what it does pretty easily with almost no context. However writing it was a real pain since it’s not always obvious what exactly makes a valid sentence. It’s the uncanny valley effect, almost like a natural language but with even more arbitrary and hard to learn rules. You keeping thinking you should be able to say thing that aren’t allowed. I’m sure that given enough time you become proficient in writing inform code but it’s a painful process.
Anyhow the game I created was a Monty Python themed adventure game. Be warned, it’s almost impossible to complete if you haven’t watched the movie :)
Grab the code or get the zblorb to run in your favorite z-machine interpreters.
-- June 20, 2010
I ran into a funny bug today trying to open an HTML file in Chrome. Could’ve sworn the “HTML document” format is what Chrome does :)
Posted via email
from Tim Disney's Posts
-- January 01, 2010
- The probably of God's existence is one in two
(since God either exists or doesn't exist).
- The probability that God became incarnate is
also one in two (since it either happened or it didn't).
- The evidence for God's existence is an argument for the resurrection.
- The chance of Christ's resurrection not being reported by the gospels has
a probability of one in 10.
- Considering all these factors together, there is a one in 1,000 chance that the
resurrection is not true.
Ah math. Is there nothing you can't prove?
Posted via web
from Tim Disney's Posts
-- December 14, 2009
I just put together a little framework to help writing scripts against twitter streams called cltwitter. It’s pretty basic right now but the idea is that the framework handles grabbing the twitter stream you specify and then passing the stream through a set of filters you write.
It’s written in Rhino (javascript on top of the JVM) so the filters are in nice simple javascript and you can use any java libraries you might like (there’s a few of them out there).
At the moment there are three filters, one that strips everything but urls from the tweet, one that expands any shortened urls in the tweet, and one that posts any tweets with urls to delicious. Since filters can be combined (the output of the one filter goes into the input of the next – like unix pipes), this allows us to do some neat things like expanding all urls and then posting them to delicious.
If you’re interested I have a git repository available on github. If you don’t want to mess around with git there’s a zip file here you can use. Just unzip it an do what the README tells you.
Hope you find this useful.
-- September 15, 2009