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Informat.z5
Requires a Z-Code interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
informat.z5
original competition entry
Requires a Z-Code interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
informat.wlk
walkthrough

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Informatory

by William J. Shlaer

Educational
1998

(based on 3 ratings)
1 review

About the Story

You feel like weeping; you might as well have stayed by the slit in the stream bed and waited for plate tectonics to widen it. You are in front of that all too familiar white house again! Replay the beginnings of Adventure/Zork, with a few twists...
[--blurb from The Z-Files Catalogue]


Game Details


Awards

11th Place - 4th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (1998)

Editorial Reviews

Baf's Guide


An Inform tutorial (partially) disguised as a text adventure; partially inspired by Andrew Plotkin's somewhat similar Scheme tutorial Lists and Lists. Has a couple of basic puzzles and simple characters, but not really meant to be played as a game; useful primarily as a self-teaching tool for budding Inform programmers. Possibly the most self-referential game in the archive.

-- R. Serena Wakefield

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

Instead of teaching Inform piece-by-piece, it assigns reading in the Designer's Manual, and in fact those assignments are only reachable after solving a number of source code puzzles. Informatory therefore isn't much of a teacher, but it's a good quiz for those who are already learning. As a competition game, it's no great shakes: at its best, it's about as much fun as taking a really interesting test. However, I can see it becoming one useful tool for people who are beginning to get their feet wet in the sea of Inform.
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SPAG
There are quite a number of humerous jokes in this game including the leaflet (having written a game myself I totally agree), and the sink and flame jokes. This game resonates with me, and I'll wager (a) the Author is British, and (b) has spent several years doing a computer course.
-- David Ledgard
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A game that reveals its own Inform code as a tutorial, July 24, 2016

In this game you are supposed to be taught how to program in Inform. But you have to work for it. After some hard puzzles, you get a device that prints out the inform 6 code of any item you look at.

This is really cool, but you have to do a lot to get to it, and the rest of the game is quite a jumble.

The author compares this game to Lists and Lists, and I think that that's a fair comparison.

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This is version 5 of this page, edited by Paul O'Brian on 6 May 2022 at 12:43am. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page