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Inform 7 at Play

Inform 7 with illustrative examples of play

Inform 7: Making Actions

People want to do stuff. You can let them.

There are a few actions Inform 7 understands out of the box.

Imagine this unlikely scenario made of less than 100 words:

Kyrgyzstan is a room.  
[[Actually a country but let's let it slide.]]  
The description is "Officially the Kyrgyz Republic".

A completely standard video game crate is in Kyrgyzstan.  
The crate is pushable between rooms.  

Tajikistan is a room.  
The description is "Officially the Republic of Tajikistan."
Tajikistan is south of Kyrgyzstan.

Your Great Great Grandson is a person in Kyrgyzstan.   
The description is "He's wearing a hand-made jumpsuit."
Grandson wears a hand-made canvas jumpsuit.
The breast pocket is part of the jumpsuit.  
It is openable and closed. 
In the pocket is a creepy pewter figurine.

With just under 100 words of description, Inform understands all these actions and what’s possible in our fictional world:

Kyrgyzstan
Officially the Kyrgyz Republic

You can see a completely standard video game crate and your Great Great Grandson here.

>think
What a good idea.

>look self
As good-looking as ever.

>look at the crate
You see nothing special about the completely standard video game crate.

>look under the crate
You find nothing of interest.

>push the crate
Nothing obvious happens.

>push the crate south

Tajikistan Officially the Republic of Tajikistan.

>look
Tajikistan
Officially the Republic of Tajikistan.

You can see a completely standard video game crate here.

>push the crate north

Kyrgyzstan
Officially the Kyrgyz Republic

You can see your Great Great Grandson here.

>chop crate
Cutting it up would achieve little.

>smell grandson
You smell nothing unexpected.

>kiss grandson
your Great Great Grandson might not like that.

>kiss crate
You can only do that to something animate.

>attack grandson
Violence isn’t the answer to this one.

>ask grandson about Apocalypse Now
There is no reply.

>tell grandson about monkeys
This provokes no reaction.

>consult grandson about existentialism
You discover nothing of interest in your Great Great Grandson.

>wake grandson up
That seems unnecessary.

>wipe jumpsuit
You rub the hand-made canvas jumpsuit.

>get pocket
That seems to be a part of the hand-made canvas jumpsuit.

>open pocket
You open the pocket, revealing a creepy pewter figurine.

>put figurine on crate
(first taking the creepy pewter figurine)
That seems to belong to your Great Great Grandson.

>polish figurine
You rub the creepy pewter figurine

But what if you want to sing, spin, cry, dream, or any other of the roughly 100,000 verbs in the english language?

You will need to tell Inform how to handle them yourself. Luckily Inform gives you powerful tools to do it.

Inform leaves it to you to decide what actions are important. It can’t think of the effects of every possible action!

How to piggyback onto an existing action: understand the command!

Inform already has a good assortment of actions. You can read a list of them in the official Inform documentation, but here are some useful ones you can grab and make your own:

Let’s say you want to use another word for “smell”:

The Boudoir is a room.  
There is an empty perfume bottle in the boudoir.  
The description of the bottle is "It's an enticing and elaborate perfume bottle.  It looks as if you could just inhale its scent."

Let’s try inhaling:

Boudoir
You can see an empty perfume bottle here.

>look bottle
It’s an enticing and elaborate perfume bottle. It looks as if you could just inhale its scent.

>smell bottle
You smell nothing unexpected.

>inhale bottle
That’s not a verb I recognise.

There’s an easy way to make a synonym for smelling:

Understand the command "inhale" as "smell".

Now inhale means smell also:

>inhale bottle
You smell nothing unexpected.

You might remember the word understand from the chapter on things, where you can use it to let you to call a single object by multiple names.

Here we’re using it in a similar way: this new name is the same as a name you already “understand”.

Make a mistake: a new action that just prints a message

One of the easiest ways to make a totally new action work is by making it a mistake:

Understand "yell at the statue" as a mistake 
("The statue does not understand how serious you are about this.").

Here you’re telling it to understand a whole command as a “mistake”:

>yell at the statue
The statue does not understand how serious you are about this

It doesn’t really matter if the action is an actual “mistake”. It could be something you want the player to do. Using the mistake command lets you just print out a message and tell Inform not to do anything else.

Actions without a thing: report

@TODO

Report smelling: say "Then again, you don't have the best sense of smell. Maybe if you smell specific things it will be easier to discern a smell.".

Make a brand new action

@TODO

Understand the verb "pinch" as pinching.

Simple actions with instead

TO DO: Reminders to myself: