I hardly need to add any more books to my stuffed bookshelves, but I was wondering what books other IF authors find useful when they’re writing games?
Obviously there are system specific books, e.g. for Twine and Inform among others. Eg in order of publication (though remember some of these are very out of date now for current systems):
The Inform Designer’s Manual by Graham Nelson (4th ed, 2001)
The Inform Beginner’s Guide by Roger Firth and Sonja Kesserich (2003)
Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 by Aaron Reed (2010)
Writing Interactive Fiction with Twine by Melissa Ford (2016)
And there are generic IF authorship books that can be useful. For example I’m thinking of this one:
IF Theory Reader by Kevin Jackson-Mead and J. Robinson Wheeler (2011)
But what about more general design books, whether for IF or more widely about games and/or writing? Have you found any particularly good for sparking ideas, or helping you manage a complex writing project? For instance there are a lot of creative writing books out there, and many advice books from authors like Stephen King. Have you found any of these to be particularly useful when writing IF?
There are also many retro text adventure books from the 1980s, but are these interesting for inspiring ideas still for modern authors, or are they more of interest as historical artefacts?
I searched for an existing thread about this topic, but couldn’t find it. The closest was @Niebuhr’s more general thread about books about interactive fiction, which has some great tips, and is worth checking out.
Thanks!