[I6] Which short game should I translate?

Hey everyone!

I’ve been looking at Swedish Inform with the intent of writing a game. The writing part is tough, though, so I thought I’d try my hand at translating an existing one. So far, though, the only sources I’ve found other than the ones on the I6 homepage were of Dreamhold (intimidating, particularly with its customized library) and Shade (which I don’t really feel could be done justice outside of the American vernacular).

So I’d like to ask any author here for permission and/or concrete suggestions on what game to translate. I’d prefer if it were in I6 (less work building code from scratch), but either I7 or TADS would be fine.

Any takers? I’m happy to translate just about anything really; there’s no expectation of the work being a Comp winner or anything.

Don’t know if it’s your cup of tea, but my The Baron has its I6 source code available on the IF archive under a free software license. Fate too, but that is I7.

This might be useful too, although it is quite incomplete:

ifwiki.org/index.php/Free_Software_IF

Although I’ve never played it before, I decided to try it out just now. It seems dense and meaningful and well-written, but also on the large side. More to the point, I can’t seem to find the source on the IFArchive, so I have no idea of the amount of text I’d need to translate.

Hm, yes, the is a significant amount of text. All Things Devours might be a better fit, and it’s an excellent puzzle game. I need to be at home to check about the source code, though. (Should be in the archive, but I can’t easily search it now.)

Ok. So the current candidates are

  • All things devours (can’t find the source though)
  • The Baron (bit big, but intriguing)

Any more suggestions, guys?

The source code to All things devours seems to be here: http://www.amirrorclear.net/flowers/game/devours/devours.inf

Excellent! Thank you.

Are there more games though? I thought I’d get as wide a cross-section as possible.

IFDB lists 110 games with I6 source available: ifdb.tads.org/search?sortby=new& … guage%3Aen

Most of those don’t have an open source license though so you’d have to find the authors and ask for a permission, although I suspect they’re more likely to allow translations since they published the source code in the first place.

Bloody fantastic. Thank you.

I have looked into several games a few years ago for the same reason as you. The shortest ones with source available I could find were All Things Devours and Shade, at around 1300 strings (not the greatest metric, but oh well). You also have “The Wedding” at 1700 strings. In the end we went with Shade, but there’s a few tricky parser bits that you have to rewrite/customize to your language ; it took about 2-3 months on and off.

(If you’re interested, I have a Python script on my Bitbucket that is supposed to help with the process: it extracts the strings so you can work with a .po file instead of mucking about in the code, and tells you how many you have left. Feel free to use it.)