"You are cordially invited to the wedding of Malcolm Hardcastle and Deborah D'Arcy". What should have been a fairly dull day, watching old mate Malcolm get hitched, has turned into something rather more unusual. The groom has gone missing mere hours before the service, and you have been called in by a mysterious-sounding woman to help. Where has Malcolm got to? How can the odd assortment of characters within D'Arcy Manor help you on your quest? And how on earth are you going to get in there in the first place, with a nasty security guard watching the entrance?
The Wedding is my first work of interactive fiction, compiled with Inform. The original version was written in the space of a month and entered into the Acorn User 1996 Interactive Fiction competition, where it achieved second place overall. Since then, it has grown somewhat, going through two major updates (involving more rooms, more puzzles and the arrival of a certain canine friend).
The release two source code is available from the ftp IF-archive - click here to download. (This consists of a number of files, and is compressed. Use PKUNZIP on PCs or !SparkFS on Acorns. Presumably there are applications that do a similar job on other machines.)
The very last internet release of the story file (release four) can be downloaded from the following link:wedding.z5. This is to be considered the definitive version, as I do not intend to maintain it any longer. I compiled a release five, but this was a special edition for the Acorn User Dec 97 cover CD Rom. (Unfortunately, if you don't own an Acorn machine with CD Rom drive, you won't be able to read it.)
This is a small game I wrote in a couple of days as part of my final year degree project (believe it or not). The teacher is collecting all the craft projects at the end of the lesson, and you haven't even started. Salvation lies in the form of the Thingumy machine, a device that will construct a wonderful thingimijig if you feed it the right materials. But where are you likely to get a battery, piece of wood, map, banana skin and book about lilies at such short notice?
As it is so small (and a bit naff, to be honest), I haven't uploaded it to GMD. However, it is available from this web site using this link to the thingy.z5 file. The source is also available: click here for thingy.inf.
The last great spellmaker, Drew Tungshinach, has disappeared, and it is your job, as an agent of the Sacromys Pemcoangs Secret Service, to discover what has happened to him. This game was entered in the Third Annual Interactive Fiction Competition, where it achieved 8th position. Click here to download the game, and see what you make of it. (The file is approximately 115k long, and the game is quite short.) Judging from the reviews, most people thought that it was 'okayish', though of course a few people hated it and one or two really liked it. The floating-letters title screen seemed to go down well, though. (In fact, most people seemed to prefer the title screen to the rest of the game...)
Following on from Freefall (the Z machine's answer to Tetris) and Robots, The Mad Bomber is another arcade favourite. A number of trainee pilots are stuck over cities with very little fuel left, but an infinite supply of bombs on board. They must level the cities in order to land safely. (Presumably they'd then be arrested, but hey, this is only a game!) To play this game, you will need an interpreter that can handle timed inputs. It is also recommended that you pick an interpreter that can do colour, but the current version of the game should be able to run a passable black-and-white version if this isn't the case. (I'm told that it works with MaxZip on the Macintosh.) Click on the following links for the game and the source code.
A small and silly little thing I knocked up one weekend, after feeling rather glum. I originally planned to release it anonymously on GMD (hence the fact that my name isn't on it), but changed my mind. It doesn't adhere to some of the standard rules of IF, and is grossly unfair to anyone who doesn't think the way I do, but nevertheless, some people may find it interesting. The following link is for the z-code file. (If you get stuck, read the z-code file with a decent file editor - you should be able to find a solution there.)
Written for the 1998 April Fools project, co-ordinated by Cody Sandifer, this was a little something I knocked together to poke fun at the spate of surreal games being released (including my own AWITL). I didn't put much effort into it, but changing the score and location bars to accept colour and look acceptable took a bit of doing. The game should be somewhere at GMD. I'll see about releasing the code soon.
I used to maintain a list of Inform games created by other people, giving brief information about each game and where to find them. There are almost one hundred games on the list, including twenty-one competition entries. Click here to download a copy of the list. It has now been superseded by the zfiles module - see below.
Twenty brand-spanking-new Inform games have recently been released, as entries in the 1997 IF competition. Check out this link.
An electronic version of the gameslist is now available - a z-code module with the name 'zfiles.z8', by Gunther Schmidt. This borrows a little from my gameslist, but mainly contains the author's own descriptions and lists. The location should be something like ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/zfiles.z8, but don't quote me on that.
This page last updated 5 April 1998