Zarf Updates

I will keep this short, because I just noticed that I have to run to the Boston IF meetup soon, and I want to get this post out before then. (A late-night blog post would wind up dated "April 1", and do any of us need that additional cognitive stress? I think not.)

In the past month I have completed thirteen rooms, with all the objects, descriptions, recipes, and messages that appear therein. As usual, some of these rooms are fairly bare (corridors) and others are crowded with stuff.

I have also completed the tutorial -- which took nearly two weeks on its own. The tutorial is intended to hold your hand through the first room. That's basically the content of the teaser game. It requires more code than you might expect. It's done, though.

I have mapped out the "environmental spell component" that I mentioned last month, and started coding it up. That's not a huge task; it was just a corner of planning that I kept sweeping around, and now I've gotten to it.


I did not put in any time on the Edifice Gumshoe project idea. I still have hopes for it, but it wasn't gonna happen this month.

I have finished up some infrastructure work (bug fixes and feature requests for the Inform 6 compiler). These will someday enable bigger and better IF games. They may enable Hadean Lands to be more memory-efficient, but that wasn't the primary goal -- I just wanted to keep the track clear ahead, as it were.

Speaking of bigger and better IF: Graham Nelson has publicly admitted to a planned release date of April 30 for the next release of Inform 7. This is very exciting; the current release of I7 is three years old and the bug list has been building up.

One of the lines in that post mentions "a full index for the documentation." I cheerfully claim responsibility for that one. It's a complete rewrite and update of my old I7 index page. I worked very hard on this in January and February of 2013. Soon it will be out in the world, fully integrated with the I7 IDE.

Am I going to update HL to use the new version of I7? I haven't decided yet. I'll give it a shot. But I've got a lot of code written for the current version. Even if it all compiles with the new version (which it might not; I use a lot of low-level hacks) it might not work exactly the same. And I'd rather not spend a lot of time re-testing existing code, when I could be writing new code. So we'll see.

Upcoming Zarf events:

I will be at the MassTLC Made In MA party on April 10, demoing Seltani. (Also Meanwhile, Dreamhold, and the rest of the iOS demo pack.)

I will be at Balticon in May. I will be on some kind of IF-related panel but I don't know the details yet. (There just might be another Lost Pig run.)

I have made plans to attend Dragoncon for the first time. As usual, watch for the hideous plaid jacket.

And that's it for the month, I guess. See you at the end of April for... more rooms. Probably a lot more rooms, now that the tutorial is all hammered in.