Advice for someone moving from Quest to Inform 7?

Hi,

I’ve released six games over the last two years on the Quest platform. (textadventures.co.uk/user/view/m … necrodeath)

I love the Quest editor but issues with game servers, OS compatibility etc. have ‘forced’ me to move to Inform (I had it in mind to give it a go at some point anyway, one of my games was ported to Inform by another author/coder).

Over the last few days I have been porting one of my Quest games to Inform. So far so good!

Is there any general advice that would be helpful?

Help on this forum so far has been humbling; you’re a classy group! Thank you.

My best advice is to read the documentation in the IDE and experiment with the examples provided (there are buttons that will drop code right in). You needn’t read every word of the documentation straight through right off - you can make a compelling game with just rooms and objects and descriptions - but it really helped me to work with the concepts as I went.

Due to this, I tend to remember odd details in the examples which I can use to search the documentation. I can’t tell you how many time I’ve searched for “sports a tory rosette” when making verb relations because I remembered the phrasing in the example.

Thanks for your thoughts.

The assertion verb will def come in useful for me.

One thing I remember from Quest is the use of the generic action verb “USE something with something.” In Inform, this verb is not included as a default. Inform encourages the use of specific verbs for specific actions.

Of course, you can create a USE action. Nevertheless, I find that having specific verbs helps create a much more beautiful player experience.

The same with TALK TO, versus ASK/TELL ABOUT a specific subject.

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