This year the FunHack village celebrates 10 years of BornHack by going back in time to the 1980s. Many things happened in this decade, and one of those things was that a software company by the name of Infocom released popular games whose primary game mechanic was text: The player typed commands, which then printed interesting text, prompting more commands to be typed and more interesting text to be printed, until the game ended or the player gave up because games were really hard back then.
As an example, the "get laptop" part of the title of this talk is a representative example of a command that you could type in a game containing a laptop. This command would then make your virtual avatar pick up a laptop if one was near.
Infocom had a complicated game authoring pipeline involving a Lisp programming language, a virtual machine, and many interpreters. This is an inspiration to us all. A new 32-bit virtual machine from 1999, inspired by the old virtual machine from the 1980s, is used today by hobbyist text game writers to continue the tradition.
Our primary focus in this talk will be to present BORNHACK ADVENTURE, a modern take on the classic text adventure, taking place in a virtual version of the BornHack venue.
We are writing our game in Inform 7, a programming language where you program in a subset of English. This language was originally released 19 years ago and targets the virtual machine from 26 years ago. It is not based on Lisp, but we were still able to understand how to use it.
This talk includes, but is not limited to:
- A short and opionated introduction to Inform 7 where we talk about our experience as programmers using a programming language designed for non-programmers.
- A discussion of what tricks to use to keep up the illusion that the virtual BornHack is the real deal.
- Inspirations, learnings, and takeaways to carry over into your professional lives.
Most of all we want you to try our game. We will make continual improvements throughout the BornHack event.
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