Linear Storytelling Widget

The linear storytelling widget is a code template for telling a simple choice-bassed story with Inform 7. To make your own story, you'll want to download Inform. This project used version 10.1.2, which is the latest version at the time of this writing.

There are three resources available on this page:

• "Linear Storytelling Widget": source code that authors can edit to make their own game. It is plain text: just copy and paste its contents into an Inform project to start editing right away.
• "Let's Make IF with Marbles": a demonstration game that shows what the source code does and explains where the different parts of the game are in the code. Playable on this web page, or downloadable as a stand-alone story file.
• "Demo Game Source Code": source code for "Let's Make IF with Marbles". Useful for reviewing the "Widget" code in a completed work.

I recommend having the template code open while playing the demonstration game. That way, authors can check places in the template that are referenced while playing.

To make your own game:

1. Copy/paste the source code from the "Linear Storytelling Widget.
2. Edit all quoted passages containing "##", adding in your own text.
   1. tip: do a find (control-F on Windows systems) on "##" to seek out passages you may have missed.
   2. tip: you can search the project for tables referenced by the demo game, as well.

That's it! Really! If you have some experience with Inform, there are ways to tweak or modify the code, but the "Widget" is a complete game structure. "Let's Make IF with Marbles" was made without modifying the code in the template. 

Some other notes:

• The template is heavily commented. This is useful for learning how the program works or for modifying the code. In Inform, comments are set between brackets ("[" and "]"). However, reading the comments is not required. Simply editing text is enough to make a game.
• The second half of this template is used to disable the usual parser commands: that's what makes this template suitable for choice-only games. There is no need to edit anything back there beyond some error messages. If you want an example message, try typing a nonsense command in the demo game, something like "afldkjhfasd".
• Almost every programming tactic used in this project is discussed on my blog, Top Expert. You can review those posts here to learn about how this template was developed.
  • In particular,the release notes for the poetic version of this template, the "Lyric Storytelling Widget", gives tips for more experienced beginners to make modifications to the code.

(Thanks to Lionstooth and Max Fog for testing support)