Blue Lacuna is now out of beta

Aaron’s game, Blue Lacuna, is now completed and out of beta. This game has to be one of the largest works of IF to date, if not the largest. At an incredible 5 MB for the glulxe story, 385000 words of I7 source text, 250000 words of prose, this work sets the standard and truly tests the Inform 7 development system.

As a tester for the work, Aaron has demonstrated his commitment to quality control and overall accessibility. It is highly recommended. The work, plus links to relevant interpreters can be downloaded from here.

Note, according to Aaron, Zoom isn’t recommended, however I did test under it and it’s fully workable for blind players. For the first move, type “screenreader”, omitting the quotation marks of course. This will improve accessibility by listing keywords and relevant conversation topics under the prose.

Replaying an old favourite

I recently played through Suzanne Britain’s “Worlds Apart” again. My first experience with this game was during my first year at the university of Hertfordshire. It left somewhat of an impression on me at that time, but playing through it again, it seems less interesting. This isn’t to say it is badly written or anything like that, I suspect it is to do with my greater understanding of IF design in general, but most likely due to the fact that I have done the fantasy genera to death. There is only so much “His Dark Materials” one can take. WA does kind of fall into this category, but it is even more driven by mood setting. It is prose heavy, so those who are wanting a light time of it should not play this game.

It’s saving grace however, is the fact that the puzzles are relatively easy. There is the odd “guess the verb” and “guess what the author is thinking” puzzle but on the hole it isn’t mind-blowingly difficult to play through. There are adaptive hints that do work well. It was written in TADS 2 so there are not as many niceties with the conversation system, but Britain has actually fleshed her NPC’s out rather well considering.

Highly recommended for those who like well written prose.

Floatpoint

I finally got round to completing Emily Short’s Floatpoint. As a game it really demonstrates some of the nicer things in Inform 7, most notably, the use of dynamic tables and relations.

My favourite part of the game is the built in task management system. She has implemented a virtual PDA that gives you progress on the various activities you have done and have yet to complete.

I reccomend it to those who don’t like difficult puzzles. You can get it directly from the IF Archive at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2006/glulx/floatpoint/Floatpoint.zblorb

A windows interpreter recommendation

I’d like to take some time to reccomend a really good Zcode and Glulx interpreter by SPAG editor Jimmy Maher. It can naturally play Z3, z5 and z8 games, glulx games and any ZCode game that uses cover art in blorb archives

It worked fine on all the games I tried including Emily’s Floatpoint, wich was written in Glulx using Inform 7.

Here are some suggestions on making it more accessible for the blind:

1. Go into options, select fonts, then set it to use “Currier new” rather than the usual fixed width font. This will stop screen readers from chopping off the ends of lines.
2. Remember to keep the main window maximised. I only say this because even though i’d configured the shortcut to run Filfre maximised, it still needs to be done when opening new games.

On the hole though it is highly reccomended. You can get it from Jimmy’s official site or directly from http://home.grandecom.net/~maher/filfre/filfre097.msi