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Inform Designer's Manual: 4th Edition

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Remember Infocom and their games, such as Zork, Suspect, and The Lurking Horror?

Well those games were called Interactive Fiction, and in the mid-eighties, ruled the software sales charts. Soon enough though, graphicical games took their place in popularity and Interactive Fiction seemed to have disappeared from the landscape.

Then in the early 90's, a couple of developers revived the genre with a couple of compilers, one of them called Inform. Appropriately, Inform creates games files that run against the exact same virtual machine that was used by Infocom, called the Z-Machine.

Inform is a complete language, compiler, and set of library extensions that lets an author/programmer create the same type of Interactive Fiction that was so popular in past times.

The Inform Designer's Manual: 4th Edition is the technical manual for the Inform compiler and includes an entire section on the history of the artform.

This is one of the best technical books you could ever hope for and if you have any interest in the Interactive Genre, it's a must-have for your collection.

Interactive Fiction holds a fond place in my heart, having been raised on the works of Infocom with a Commodore 64 from my pre-teen days well into High School. Thus, it was a joy to discover the Inform development system while in college, and to have the tools to develop my own text adventure in the same format as the games I had grown up with.

As a professional games developer, with several titles on the PC and XBox under my belt, I can say that Nelson's 4th Edition Inform Designers Manual is easily the most friendly read of all game development technical books. Presenting a clear "how to" style, while exposing the power of his interactive fiction development system in a logical and easy to follow manner, this book will have you running around a few rooms of your own design within an hour. Within days, any reasonable person, developer or not, will have the tools at their disposal to create complex puzzles, environments, and characters in their own text adventure.

An added bonus is the Craft Of Adventure section, which provides a brief history of Interactive Fiction, as well as design notes on what makes good puzzles; how to layout flow, pacing, and plot; what players love and what they hate (i.e. Mazes); and how to create a game that is polished, compelling, and enveloping.

This is the only book I would recommend to a young teenager interested in games development. Not only is Interactive Fiction one of the few types of games that can still be developed by a single person, but the introduction to object oriented coding, game state management, and the complexity of game development offered by Inform are invaluable lessons for anyone considering a career in games development. In fact, I wish more professional game developers read this book (especially the "Craft" section) and developed Interactive Fiction in their spare time to hone their skills and better understand the roots of their discipline.

First of all, this book is well made. At first glance, it looks like one of those O'Rielly books, but closer inspection will reveal it's lay-flat binding that lets you open the book completely, without worrying about creasing the spine.

This book is well written. Inform (the compiler) was written by Graham Nelson while he was writing his classic game "Curses." So not only are you getting a manual written by a top notch programmer, but an excellent writer as well.

Really, though, I consider this book to be a part of Internet History. How often do you get the chance to be part of a small, relatively obscure group of artists & programmers (Interactive Fiction Authors) all over the world, and own a *physical* piece of it? I mean... sure you can download the Inform manual in PDF format and take it to Kinkos to have it bound, but the extremely limited printings of this book make it something worth having.

If you're a programmer and you're reading this, wondering just what the heck this is all about, this is a compiler & series of libraries that allow you to relatively quickly, create classic text adventure games. Instead of creating your own physics model, Inform comes with libraries that let you quickly define rooms, bottles, clocks, rubber tubing, white houses, mailboxes, elvish swords, and so on. Once you create a game, it will be playable on any number of platforms, from gameboy to palm to mac, pc, java...

If you're an enthusiastic game player with little to no programming experience looking to create a piece of interactive art... run. Run screaming. Run screaming, and don't look back. Programming isn't easy, and it will be many many months or years before you can produce a viable game.

If you're a beginning programmer looking for a fun way to get some experience, this may be a good, fun way to start. A few early successes will hopefully encourage you to work harder, and the C-like syntax will help you grasp a few programming basics.

If you're any or none of the above, check out rec.arts.int-fiction, which is where all the IF game designers hang out. :-)

In a word, this book is excellent.

Graham Nelson is a great writer, and he knows this subject VERY
well. The book serves as an excellent introduction to the
Inform language and to interactive fiction authoring generally
and also a good reference source. (In fact, this book is
probably a large part of the reason that Inform is so much more
popular than TADS, which is older.) Additionally, the section
on the world model, with the Ruins examples, makes a great
introduction to object-oriented programming generally. The
essays on game design issues are useful even to people using
other languages than Inform to create interactive fiction or,
for that matter, related genres such as graphical adventures.

The writing style throughout is excellent -- clear and easy
to follow, but with adequate detail. (The sidebars sometimes
provide more detail than is necessary for beginners, but these
can be safely skipped until later, and the main text makes
sense without them.) Only the appendices really come across
as very technical.

I was initially introduced to this book through the third
edition, which introduced me to and has shaped my view of
object-oriented programming. Naturally, when I saw the
announcement that the fourth edition was going to be made
available in print form, and that it would include the Ruins
examples, I rushed to preorder, and I was not disappointed.

This book is also available in other formats, which are
convenient for searching, but if you are like me you will
want a print copy.

Interactive Fiction is not dead. Those text adventures from the 80s are as alive today as they ever were, and they have company. Lots of people out there are writing new, even better text adventures than were previously commercially available. And many of those new games are being written in the INFORM language.

INFORM now exists as two very different versions. 6.0 and 7.0. 6.0 is a more structured language, a language that would be familiar to coders who know Pascal, C, Python, etc. 7.0 is a more "natural language" approach.

DM4 deals in INFORM 6.0, and is the definitive guide to the language. Filled with examples and excellent descriptions of commands and concepts, it can take anyone from basic simple ideas to a finished game without fail.

It's also an impressive tome. A nice hard-cover book. And while it is also available as a PDF file online, there is nothing like leaving through this volume and finding the perfect solution to your current coding issue, or learning a new concept.

Highly recommended for Inform 6.0.

Sadly, Inform 6.0 is practically deceased. More people are writing in Inform 7.0, and for the definitive book for Inform 7.0, get Aaron Reed's book on the topic, also available on Amazon.