Interactive Fiction Project
Due November 14-21.
Your major project for this course will be an interactive fiction written with the Inform 6 language. You may work on this project individually, or in groups of two or three.
Each author or group will prepare a preliminary proposal before starting on the project. Authors/groups will also produce a guided tour or walk-through of their fictions: a log of a play session representing a winning traversal of the game. Finally, in a separate assignment, authors/groups will play-test each other's work and write a brief, evaluative report.Criteria for Evaluation
Your game should be challenging, but ultimately winnable.
Your game should reflect good principles of game design, balancing rules against complications, clarity against emergent phenomena.
If you can find a way to tell an interesting story with an engaging world and characters, so much the better.
Your game should demonstrate proficiency with Inform, showing artful use of its affordances. Obvious technical errors will diminish your outcome.
Try to introduce as much variety as you can to the game, minimizing as much as possible the repetitive and mechanical aspects of I.F.
Specifications
Your game must have at least 20 rooms, at least five non-player characters, and at least 10 props. Feel free to exceed any of these minimums.
Every room must be reachable by at least one navigation path.
There must be a scoring system.
You must provide for both winning and losing outcomes.
Deliverables
- Game: Upload to your student-iat account, or the account of the group reporter, both a source (.inf) and an object (.z5) file. These files should be named either with your last name, if you are working alone, or with a name you choose for your group. It is your responsibility to tell me this name.
- Walkthrough: Upload to your or your reporter's directory a Word or text document called nameWalkthrough.doc or nameWalkthrough.txt. "Name" in this case will be the author or project name, as described above. As indicated, the walkthrough should be a transcript of a session in which the player wins. You may want to detour through any parts of the game you find especially clever and good. You may also want tp include notes in the walkthrough, calling my attention to details you would like me to notice.
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