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Sep. 4th, 2001 09:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishWriting IF is substantially different from GMing.
If I'm GMing I can jump in with a vague idea of what I expect to have happen and who the big players are, and pull plot points out of my ass. In an IF game, I have to come up with all possible contingencies ahead of time. This is made only slightly palatable by the fact that there aren't but so many contingencies (something like two dozen commonly used verbs... maybe less).
If you haven't (and I assume most of you haven't), go play Andrew Plotkin's excellent game, Spider and Web. (The Java version seems to be perfectly functional, although you can't save.) Now. Seriously. It's the best piece of interactive fiction I've seen... well... ever, really. Although I haven't seen much of the more recent stuff. It just... it's just great. It's the kind of thing I wish I'd written, because it does what it sets out to do so bloody well.
Really. Dig up an interpreter from the IF-archive and download the Z-code story file and play it.
Um. Back on topic.
This difference may bite me at some point. It means I'll probably be far too slack in my initial coding and have to go back and throw all kinds of fixes in for things uncovered in testing, which isn't good at all... the story starts to look like it's got band-aids on at a certain point in that process. I'll burn that bridge when I get to it, I guess... and this overly laid-back style should serve me well in the initial design. Unless it doesn't, and the story turns out like a mess instead of a unified whole. Only one way to find out, neh?
If I'm GMing I can jump in with a vague idea of what I expect to have happen and who the big players are, and pull plot points out of my ass. In an IF game, I have to come up with all possible contingencies ahead of time. This is made only slightly palatable by the fact that there aren't but so many contingencies (something like two dozen commonly used verbs... maybe less).
If you haven't (and I assume most of you haven't), go play Andrew Plotkin's excellent game, Spider and Web. (The Java version seems to be perfectly functional, although you can't save.) Now. Seriously. It's the best piece of interactive fiction I've seen... well... ever, really. Although I haven't seen much of the more recent stuff. It just... it's just great. It's the kind of thing I wish I'd written, because it does what it sets out to do so bloody well.
Really. Dig up an interpreter from the IF-archive and download the Z-code story file and play it.
Um. Back on topic.
This difference may bite me at some point. It means I'll probably be far too slack in my initial coding and have to go back and throw all kinds of fixes in for things uncovered in testing, which isn't good at all... the story starts to look like it's got band-aids on at a certain point in that process. I'll burn that bridge when I get to it, I guess... and this overly laid-back style should serve me well in the initial design. Unless it doesn't, and the story turns out like a mess instead of a unified whole. Only one way to find out, neh?