Re: Potential new IF author needs advice


13 Nov 1995 20:47:31 GMT

Chris <boognish@ucla.edu> wrote:
> I have NO idea how to program, and quite honestly, little desire to
> learn. I've browsed the manuals for TADS and Inform and have become
> disheartened by the idea of all painfully menial code-learning and
> scripting I'd have to go through to design my game.

A serious answer for you:

Learn to program. It may be hard work, but it is also enormous fun.
Hard work is not something that you can get away from: if you want to
produce something worthwhile, then you will have to put it a lot of
effort in any genre, be it interactive fiction, novels, music or
whatever. There is nothing "menial" about learning to program, any more
than there is anything menial about learning to play the violin.

I write interactive fiction because I can combine my passions for
writing and programming. I am an average writer, and only a half-decent
programmer, but IF allows me to combine the two disciplines and create
something different from either. In IF, writing and programming are not
independent, but interact in complex ways and result in something quite
different from the result of a collaboration between a writer who did
not program and a programmer who did not write.

-- 
Gareth Rees