The Creative Process #45 - The IF Study Course

This month I've launched a new long-term project: The Interactive Fiction Study Course. Every session I choose a notable work of interactive fiction, play it, dissect it for specific lessons, and offer some related exercises in writing, design and implementation.

People seem pleased with the idea, but it's a project that will play out over a while. The intermediate developer space for interactive fiction is a bit empty these days since Emily Short stopped blogging, and I hope these exercises help.

The easiest part of this process was curating a list of games to look at. I have about 50 without really digging deep, nor including too many "classic" games from the Infocom days when the craft was still being explored.

The site is built with a bespoke static site generator written in Rust. It takes 8ms to build everything from scratch, which tickles me (my website uses Python and takes six seconds, and I remember my old Wordpress site that would take a second or two to update a single page dynamically). I love static site generators. I made the world's worst site icon for the site. The site styling is plain but nice enough. There's a load of little tweaks to make it accessible to screen-readers and the like, which I think is typically under-done on the Internet.

I have two exercises up so far and an obligatory "What is interactive fiction?" essay. Writing useful exercises will be hard. I've given myself a pocket full of get-out-of-jail cards by admitting up front that I'm keen to evolve the site over time following suggestions and my own interactions with it. The original idea was just a series of exercises for myself, but sharing it with the community and being open to feedback means it can be a much better thing in the end.

This might be a more useful product than this newsletter. And more actionable, because the newsletter became a summary of my month of creative work, which I could only write at the very end of the month. This way I can work sporadically throughout the month on the course (for others and doing my own exercises). I have the idea of posting my responses to the exercises as editions of this newsletter instead of the usual project talk. That idea might be an experiment as well - I'm happy to hear feedback on whether you'd want to read that.

The very first exercise is a warm-up: how to play a game slowly and take notes on craft. It's directly analogous to exercises for writers where you read a favourite or famous piece, but forensically go through it line-by-line. This is different from writing a review or recapping your playthrough.

The next exercise is the first proper one. It examines the onboarding and use of difficulty levels in last year's IF Comp winner Detritus. That game did both very well, and it weaves together excellent writing, design and implementation. Perfect to learn from!

Our Prime Minister recently gave an address to the nation about the upcoming months being tough. I'm using this project as a way to improve myself and help others, without it being too much of a burden since there'll be enough of that to go around in the near future. It's a minor reconfiguration for myself, but keeps the goal of making cool things for cool people.

I hope everyone's doing as well as possible in these bewildering times.