ADRIFT (short for Adventure Development & Runner - Interactive Fiction Toolkit) is What We Have All Been Waiting For. It's a windows-based, IF design system that allows for the construction of very large, complex games entirely through the use of pull-down menus. I.E., without ANY CODING AT ALL! Once you get it (from Campbell Wild's home page listed in my Links section)., you can (drumroll please) start writing right away!
So how does it work? In appearance it resembles pretty much any other WINDOWS based, input-driven application like WORD or EXCEL. The menu system is almost totally intuitive for anyone who has ever played an IF game before - the menus for writing room descriptions, character information, and cues for tasks and events can be figured out as you work on the elementary stages of your game from scratch. The program provides a whole host of internal devices, including a visual mapping window, a spell-checker and a screen for mapping out multi-layered dependencies amongst the various task that the game assigns to the player, so that you know your character has to eat the sandwich and jump across the chasm before he kills the heffalump, releases the magic jewel and gets the girl. Perhaps most helpfully, the 'runner' program can be started up any time to run through what you've written so far, without any of the tiresome intermediate stages of compiling and debugging that one has to go through with systems like TADS, ALAN and INFORM.
I've been tinkering with this device for a couple of weeks now, and have yet to come down from my natural high. The thing would be worth celebrating for the sake of the game runner alone, which looks great onscreen and has a couple of neat little graphical features (a map display option and a clickable compass) that enhance the experience of playing any work of IF without bringing it across the shady line into Graphical Adventure Game territory. From the point of view of someone trying to recruit new folks into the IF fold, it's a godsend. I have had any number of friends over the past few years reminisce to me about how much fun those old Infocom games were, and ask me how easy I think they'd find it learning how to write their own IF from scratch, and I've always had to lie egregiously. Even the least...er....logically gifted of them could master ADRIFT within a couple of days. And there's even a tutorial available for the slow of uptake (a group which might possibly end up including the present author, if the game I'm belting out on this thing gets much more complicated).
| Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: | View all related messages |
For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to Mark Silcox's Interactive Fiction topic, please visit the Discussions page.