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About ceebot9/17/2023 ![]() You can’t do that with straight-up Python. The thing with inform is that it looks friendly, and will tell you in fairly plain terms that “I don’t understand that statement – it’s like you’re saying one thing is also another thing, and that can’t be true.” Sure, that’s a little… weird, when you’re just saying “Oh, that cord there? If the player mentions that, they’re talking about the keyboard.” or “The Hallway Door is scenery west of the Bedroom.”, but with a little bit of explaining from a teacher, it isn’t that hard to understand at all.Īnd, I think I didn’t explain myself very well, but you guys are really missing something here – I want to teach people to code while making games. And if you’re following along with a lesson, then you should already have the simpler tools to help you communicate with the program, too. ![]() You already have half the tools in your arsenal, just because you’re writing in plain English and know how to form a sentence. Yes, but you get very quick feedback on what you did wrong in the program, and there are many ways to try and word things. It arguably strongly violates the principle of least surprise by being far from transparent about which natural English constructions it will understand. Inform 7 is a very easy language to read, but not to write. Especially since there are so many ways you can teach things. That and I might have naively thought that learning I6 might be easier than trying to cover everything you can possibly try to do with Haxe, even though I’m not familiar enough with either to make that call.Įssentially, if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, but I’d like to dig in and learn some things before really making that call. I chose I7 instead of other game making tools I’m somewhat familiar with (like Stencyl) because there’s a relatively low threshold to understanding the interface to the program, and because it’s easy to make games with. Hopefully my response wasn’t unintentionally annoying and dismissive! Though, I wonder if that’s what you mean – do all versions of Inform, or at least most, have the ability to play I6 coded games in them?ĮDIT: Ack, sorry – my internet is acting up, and I didn’t see the newer posts before replying. ![]() It would require them switching between projects, but that’s okay.Īnd, well, I don’t mind if it isn’t supported as a game, as long as it runs in the original program. ![]() …Well, I mean, not exactly the same, but with the same ideas and concepts and general outputs. Making a side-by-side mirror game would probably be for the best. But again, you’d spend a lot of time explaining how Inform treats high-level predicate verbs before that starts to make any sense. The related phrase “ if the player carries all shiny treasures…” would do more with those variables. There’s also the boilerplate about qcy_0 and qcn_0, which do absolutely nothing. (An auto-generated linked list of objects of the “shiny treasure” class.) But you have to dig up a lot of turf to explain what IK16 is. You can explain to a neophyte that this traverses a linked list and calls a function on each object. You can dig down into the called function Prop_1(), which (ignoring comments) looks like: qcy_0 = 0 ![]() (Lines starting with “!” are comments.) ! When play begins: The compiler translates that into the following I6 code. Consider this simple I7 rule: When play begins: now the player carries all shiny treasures. I’ll skip over rooms, since (as noted) it’s messy to integrate an I6 room into an I7 project. It goes from very high-level to very low-level without any stops in between. I’m not sure I7 is going to be a good tool for this. Essentially, I’m thinking of teaching people to code by letting them do it in natural language, and then peeling back the systems to do the actual code behind it. ![]()
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