Hi Lisa, Well, if you want my personal opinion I think you might be better served with starting out with a general purpose programming language like Python instead. Inform is certainly fine for writing interactive fiction, because that is exactly what it was designed to do, but there is a major down side to starting out too simple. What I am saying is Inform was designed for people who have a specific interest in writing simple text adventures with absolutely no programming background or education. Problem is it doesn't really teach you anything constructive in terms of programming either because it doesn't get into topics like functions, classes, variables, etc in any depth to carry over to another programming language. As a result if you wrote a few text adventures and wanted to write something else, maybe like a Space Invaders clone, you'd have to start from scratch again anyway since Inform simply wasn't designed to create that kind of game.
So I'd pick Python. It is slightly more complex than something like Inform, but the pay off for learning it is huge. It is one of the fastest growing languages for hobbiests, is totally free, and there is litterally thousands of pages of free documentation out there for beginning to advanced Python programmers. Its open source nature means it will remain free and well documented where languages like C# .Net, by Microsoft, will cost you something to learn because it is targeted towards professionals rather than a programming hobbiest just wanting to tinker in her own home with games. Here is a very simple example how Python is. (You might want to turn punctuation on at this point.) #Guess the number #Version 1.0 #By Thomas Ward #Selects a random number and asks you to guess it #Import the random module import random #Declare variables loop = 1 choice = 0 #Enter game loop while loop == 1: #Select a random number number = random.randrange(1, 10) #Print message print "Enter any number between 1 and 10." print "Enter 0 to exit." # Get tthe user's choice choice = input("Enter selection: ") if choice < number: print "Sorry, number is to low." if (choice > number: print "Sorry, number is too high." if (choice == number: print "Congratulations! You guessed it." elif choice == 0: loop = 0 print "Exiting Guess the Number." #End while #End program As you can see from this Python program I have just written a fairly simple guess the number game in a very few lines of code. In fact, most of the space is just taken up with comments to let you know what is going on, and some spacing to make the code more readable. Otherwise there is only like 10 lines that really matter. The rest is just for you and I to keep track of the program flow. I've heard a lot of people who say Visual Basic is the easiest language to learn for beginners, but I can say from personal experience Python is far easier than Visual Basic which is primarily why I'm suggesting it for a new game developer like yourself. With a language like this you could be up and running writing your own text adventures in a couple of weeks depending on how quickly you pick up new things. Later on if you wanted to create your own Troopenum, Judgment Day, Shades of Doom, etc you would have to learn an API like PyGame or PySFML which really isn't that bad. Definitely far easier than DirectX or some of the more professional APIs like that. To get the Python runtime and development system head over to http://python.org and for the largest source of manuals, tutorials, library reference guides, etc head over to http://docs.python.org which should get you up and running in no time. Later when you are ready visit http://pygame.org for the PyGame API, game tutorials, and yes hundreds of free sample games with source code to help you learn how to program games in Python. HTH On 11/21/10, Lisa Hayes <lhay...@internode.on.net> wrote: > Thomas thanks for this I'd start with straight text adventures and progress > up to sound games and windows games so I guess start with inform and > progress on/ is that what you'd say and where can I get the languages you > mention here? thanks again for any help. > Lisa Hayes --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gam...@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.