A complete tutorial on using Inform 7 to write AIF games is a rather ambitious project. There are several good tutorials available for writing in I7, and the bundled ‘Writing with Inform‘ documentation is a good starting point. However the only tutorials that deal with both AIF and I7 have become rather aged and don’t take full advantage of recent advances. It’s also good form for an extension such as this to showcase how it might be used in practice. But first, some pointers to other readings on I7 that are worthwhile:

Ron Newcomb’s guide explains I7 from a traditional programmer’s perspective. It’s still the best summary of classic programming techniques in I7 despite being based on a rather outdated version of I7.

Jim Aikin’s handbook is an alternative to Writing with Inform. It tackles the same topics in a different fashion and order, and it’s aimed at students. It’s not yet updated for the very last version of I7 but it should be current enough for most purposes.

Inside Erin was a magazine dedicated to AIF, and in its time contained several articles on the topic of writing AIF. It’s highly suggested to read through the generic articles; the I7 tutorials are outdated on the technical topics but are still worth reading.

Brass Lantern has several articles available which deal with both general IF-theory, game design and some Inform tutorials.

This tutorial will be published as part of the IDE documentation for the extension and also made available as posts on this blog (with a reference page). While the content will be the same in both places, the blog has the option of embedding images and hyperlinks, while the IDE version has the option of pasting in code. The IDE version will also assume that you have Inform installed, which this post is about to explain how to do.

Obtaining Inform

The latest version of Inform is available at http://inform7.com/download/, which at the time of writing is version 6M62 released December 24, 2015. The software is available for Windows, MacOS X as well as Linux. There are some differences in how the IDE is set up both visible and functionally, but all source will compile equally on the three platforms. This tutorial will be based on the Windows version of the software.

Installing Inform will (on Windows) create some sub-folders in ‘My Documents’, containing your active projects and custom extensions. Starting Inform for the first time will give you the options of loading an existing project or creating a new; later on you will also be given the option to load your last project.

Obtaining Erotic Storytelling

As the extension is still in active development, the latest version can be found on GitHub. Once it’s fit for stable releases these will be published in archives and announced on this blog.

Download the extension file to a known location. Open any project in Inform. Install the extension by going to the File menu, then select Install Extension. Navigate to the extension file you downloaded in step 1. If you have a previous version installed, you will be prompted to overwrite, select yes. Include the extension in your story by adding ‘Include Erotic Storytelling by Fictitious Frode.’