Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity. "
Graham Nelson
Ambiguity
Context
Different
Related Quotes:
" The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700. "
Graham Nelson
Fiction
Early
Changed
" If you're setting a game during the Cuban Missile Crisis, look through a library. find out what people were wearing, what other issues were in the news, how houses were furnished, what cars were being driven. Especially include things which now seem foreign. "
Graham Nelson
News
People
You
" Players very widely disagree with me about what's hard and what's easy. and in a way, 'I won, but it was a fight' is the best compliment a game can receive. "
Graham Nelson
Fight
Game
Me
" The most frequent complaint is that it's hard. True. it's a hard game to win Also, many people ask me how to use the secret debugging commands, apparently under the impression that I'll tell them. "
Graham Nelson
Game
Win
People
" What I would pay much more attention to are the few points where the player can inadvertently make a career decision. Most players end up back-tracking, though some actually enjoy this. "
Graham Nelson
Career
Enjoy
End
" By the new year of 1994, it had grown up into Inform 4 and could produce games twice as large. "
Graham Nelson
Large
Year
Up
" For a fortnight nobody at all emailed me, or posted a follow-up. Doesn't anyone care, I thought? It turned out my newsreader was broken, and hadn't posted at all. "
Graham Nelson
Me
Out
Thought
" I don't really believe in 'directions' in art; the rope twists as you follow it, that's all. "
Graham Nelson
Art
Follow
Rope
" I'm rather pleased with the new manuals. I see Inform now as a gauche young adult, having got past the stage of growing out of his shoes every few months. "
Graham Nelson
See
Young
Growing
" A deliberate choice on my part was for the player to continue to find new possibilities in the early Attic rooms far into the game. I think this builds atmosphere, though it means there's no neat division of the prologue from the middle game. "
Graham Nelson
New
Choice
Early
" If pushed, though, I'd say that the next stage will be reached when it it's no longer true that about 75% of the best games were written in 1980's on the way to that. "
Graham Nelson
True
Best
Games
" At the end of April I archived 'Curses' and Inform, and announced them on the newsgroups. "
Graham Nelson
End
Curses
Them
" This means keeping many trails open at once, inevitably requiring a fairly 'parallel' plot. This plot should be discovered rather than announced, so show, don't tell. "
Graham Nelson
Rather
Plot
Parallel
" I try to make puzzles range all the way from easy to hard, and to leave many open at once. "
Graham Nelson
Open
Try
Leave
" Eventually I found it had been working all along-but didn't show anything on screen until it had the first full page of text. I inserted 30 new lines, and suddenly my toy said 'hEllO woRlD'. An hour later I understood alphabet shifting rather better! "
Graham Nelson
Better
World
Hello
" I like to employ a form of repetition, in which the same elements recur but in different and unexpected ways. rather than being discarded as soon as they are understood or passed over. "
Graham Nelson
Like
Same
Unexpected
" Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that. "
Graham Nelson
Acorn
Used
Home