Frequently Asked Questions

Why Interactive Fiction?

At first glance, IF would seem like a rather odd choice for a personal project. The genre has essentially died out commercially, and while it is still produced by mainly hobbyists today, it has crawled into obscurity. My first experience playing IF was playing Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game in my early childhood. I was already a big Hitchhiker's fan at a young age, having listened to the entire h2g2 radio show, so learning there was a game about it was exciting. Since then, I've played portions of Zork, a Zork parody within Kingdom of Loathing, Lost Pig and Planetfall.

With my very first experience programming in 2016, the idea of creating a game in one form or another began to emerge. I made Cheese Quest , in which I faced a lot of problems and made a lot of mistakes. Upon it's completion, I decided to start working on Cheese Quest 2.

Why Not Make Something More Contemporary?

In terms of game development in general, I did do a bit of stuff in Unity, and while it was fun, there were a few problems I had.

First, I felt like I was limited by what I could find on the Unity asset store. Often it became less about what assets could I use to fit in my game and more about what game I could make from the assets I found from the store. Unless I was willing to spend a fair amount of money on a wide variety of art assets to create the characters, items or places that I wanted, I often had to piece together whatever was freely available and make it make sense. As a more minor point, this also resulted in an issue of having models with varying art styles that didn't mesh well together aesthetically.

Second, I wanted to create a game that told a story. Not necessarily a good one, but a story nonetheless. My favourite games were always ones that had a narrative component, and so it's something I really wanted to include in my own. Building single-player narrative games is expensive enough to make, and a not something I could feasibly do in Unity. This alone heavily favoured IF as a choice.

Third, I'm primarily making this game for myself and a select few individuals are who are interested. I recognize that creating something like a sidescroller or top-down shooter may be far more flashy, appeal to a larger audience, and potentially even be marketable, but I'm not really doing this to impress. My own IF is something I've genuinely wanted to make for a while.

Why not use Inform?

Inform is already a language designed specifically for creating parser-based IF. It's popular within the IF community, and would seem the most practical to use.

This is something I briefly considered. In terms of development, using Inform would undoubtedly and overwhelmingly be more productive. All the parsing, which for me is the central and most challenging problem to deal with, is all already done; So are the all the inner workings of how the player, items, NPCs, and locations interact.

That being said, I kind of like the challenge of figuring out how to solve these problems on my own. While definitely time-consuming, there's some enjoyment in "re-inventing the wheel", and a lot I can learn in doing so. Using Inform, especially Inform 7, almost feels like cheating, which takes some of the fun away from it, even if it produces a better game in the end result. So in all, I decided against using Inform and will continue to develop the game in Java.