Experiments in Browser UI for Inform

Hi all,

I’ve been playing around with Furkle’s framework to look at how I could potentially channel Inform output into various HTML elements in the page and make a more interesting environment, with information persistence, for ‘Inform parser delivered as a HTML5’ game. I’ve done a short blog on it here:

interactivefables.com/blog/d … rser-games

It is only an experiment/proof of concept. But I thought it might be interesting to continue to work on. I have some ideas around how this could actually work and I’ll implement over the coming weeks.

I would be interested in any thoughts about what features players might like to see. Also, if anyone wants to play around with this, I’ll post the source code at some point in the near future (I need to clean it up first - it really is super hacky). I also want to look at how I can make it responsive for different devices.

Ade.

Yes please! Mind blown!

I would love to make games almost exactly how your prototype works (with some font and style tweakability of course.)

My hope for this, even though it looks like it could do anything, would be a “simple” mode where someone unskilled in javascript (not that I know anyone like this, I mean, seriously) could make this work using an Inform extension and custom commands, then drop (the gblorb?) into a specialized interpreter/packager to create a standalone distributable play file. It seems possibly like that’s what you intend but it would seem too good to be true.

It’s very reminiscent of what Magnetic Scrolls did.

Is it not obvious this is what I’ve been talking about with fyrevm for years?

david, keep in mind that i have no real knowledge of the inform parser, and made the framework ade’s talking about in several (admittedly somewhat efficient) hours. i don’t have any intention of competing with you and i’ll absolutely welcome a full solution that uses zarf-approved opcodes rather than my admittedly rusty hacks!

Not worried about competition. Worried that I somehow didn’t communicate my intentions.

David, I’d love to use FyreVM. I’d love to see an example game built in it, with worked examples as a basis to build on for other games. At the moment, it’s just too tenuous - I can’t work out how to use it!

As a suggestion, to demonstrate the framework’s power, why don’t you write a short example demo game that shows off all it’s features in the same way I did with Furkle’s framework - that would give everyone something tangible to hang their hats on.

There’s a sample project in the javascript folder under Cloak. It’s not really reusable. It’s just there to show how things tie together.

I have a paid programmer turning that into a reusable standard template. That will be done in a couple of weeks and I’ll post that with documentation.

At this point, if you don’t have html/js skills, the best thing to do is wait a little longer. The authoring of fyrevm-web apps will come soon and although furkle gets us there in a different way, the fyrevm patterns will be less opaque (or at least that’s my hope).