TWIFcomp

Dear Reader (and I flatter myself by thinking that there might be one. Even one.),

I have been pulled back from the precipice of forgetting entirely about this whole blogging thing by the completion of Rover's Day Out, an interactive fiction piece mentioned previously in the blog. In fact, if I recall correctly, it was the last thing I entered in the blog before going off the rails entirely.

Rover's Day out is a "text adventure", similar in some senses to the text-based computer games which were popular in the 1980s, but quite a bit updated.

The project was written collaboratively with Ben Collins-Sussman, who is an "old hand" at interactive fiction and knows the genre well, both in terms of content and technology. Ben was responsible for any semblance of order and project organization.

The game was written as part of IFComp 2009, and is one of the twenty-odd games that can be found on the IFComp website. Anyone can download these games and play them.

Rover was written as an open source project in the Inform 7 language. The source code is hosted in a Mercurial repository on Google Code. If you want to poke around in the guts of the game, we encourage you to clone the source (but, it's probably more fun to play the game first, as the source code could be considered the mother of all spoilers).