Inform 7 (Beta)

If, like myself, you are a nerd and over the age of 30, chances are you played a few text-adventures like Zork or The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy in your day. Well, now-a-days these games are referred to as interactive fiction, and there is quite a community of modern-day nerds who are still making text-adventures that rival and even surpass the games from the Infocom heyday.

The modern development language for Infocom, or Z-Machine, type games was created by Graham Nelson and is called Inform. Z-machine games can be played on almost every computing playform including Palm handhelds and iPods! I got my first exposure to object-oriented programming by playing with Inform 6 in the late 90s. Well, in the last month, the first major upgrade to Inform in many, many years has been released.

Inform 7 unlike most programming languages, has been developed based on natural language. So instead of a cryptic list of curly brackets and functions, you simply type stuff like, "The Armoury is a room. The sword is in the armoury." And the compiler does the hard stuff. The development enviroment is really slick, and includes full documentation (Graham Nelson's Craft of Adventure is required reading for anyone even remotely interested in video game design). So if you have an abundance of free-time and a few clever puzzle ideas, start programming and you may be the next Will Wright!