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Comment by avaer | Hacker News Reader

For a couple of years I've been compiling an (admittedly worse) fuzzy-parsed version of this with GPT-3 (and friends) to generate and play out executable Javascript lore in an RPG engine.

So, I am very surprised I'm only hearing about Inform now -- clearly not hanging out in the right circles.

Does anyone have any recommendations for keeping abreast of projects like this so we can leverage the best of open source and not reinvent the wheel?

I just found out about NarraScope and I hope to attend the next one. Is there other things I should check out? Twitter firehose doesn't work too well...

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Wow, if you've been working on interactive narrative and you don't know about Inform and (I assume) interactive fiction (IF)...you are in for a treat.

Probably a reasonable overview of the community is the IF forum, intfiction.org. But there are many others.

A good overview of games written is ifdb.org and ifcomp.org. For example, https://ifdb.org/viewlist?id=k7rrytlz3wihmx2o

Things to search (include "interactive fiction" in each):

Tools: Inform, TADS, Dialog, Twine, Choicescript, Ink

People: Emily Short, Andrew Plotkin, Jon Ingold, Christine Love, Aaron Reed, Chris Crawford, Porpentine...there's so many.

Have fun!

Also, do yourself a favor and read the Inform Designer’s Manual, Edition 4. It’s dated (I think it came out in 1998) and pertains to Inform version 6, but it is still very relevant (modern Inform uses I6 under the hood), and it’s a lovely piece of technical writing.

In case you'll get an itch to play IF games, and don't know which one to choose. Picking at random from this list of top 50 as voted by community, never failed me so far:

https://ifdb.org/viewcomp?id=1lv599reviaxvwo7

https://intfiction.org/ is the main community hub these days for parser based game development, maybe some of the topics there might tickle your fancy

Also https://IFWiki.org is exactly what it sounds like. A Wiki of Interactive Fiction stuff.

Wikipedia perhaps.

Twitter etc are great for learning about new things. I don't think they are good for learning about specialized topics that have a long history.

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