Hey folks

New to the tool and I was wondering that before I dive into 'coding', what would be the best approach to planning the game? Like some kind of map drawing type thingy so you can model where all the rooms are, the links between them etc.?

Cheers, Neil

Here is a recent thread on intfiction.org that may help:

http://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtop ... =6&t=17468

Don't they mean on a planning rather than implementation level? Unless I've misunderstood the thread on intfiction (which looks to me to be specifically pertaining to inform add ons).

Personally I either fire up a graphics program and draw lots of boxes to plan the map or just resort to good old pen and paper. You also might want to research the setting prior to that: say your game is in a castle you might want to research castles which can give you ideas for both layout and inspiration for things you might not have thought of that you'd like to include.

Here is a great blog about Thimbleweed Park, the new point&click adventure by Gary Winnick and Ron Gilbert : http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/. There you get information from professional game writer

awesome resource (and Maniac Mansion is referenced too in it, hehe), thanks Pertex!

A graphics program or pen and paper sound like more work than help... !

but thanks all for the posts. Jayna I followed your link and found my way here, just what I was looking for:

http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-arc ... tools.html

Neil.

Cool! That's a nice resource.

- Jay

I'm not sure I understood your original question then (obviously Jay did lol)!

The planning of anything can be in any format. I'm guessing you were asking about a planning process where the planning information could be retained and implemented in the programming? I was more thinking about first draft. You might want to write your book in Word, but that doesn't mean you have to jot down your ideas there. But it can help I suppose.

I can definitely recommend Trizbort. It's easy to learn and get going with it. It even has the ability to automatically export your maps to code but it only supports Inform, and maybe TADS, I can't quite remember. But even still... I even use Trizbort when I'm just mapping out sections of a game as I'm playing. I find it's the perfect digital replacement for drawing on graph paper.

So who fancies writing an exporter for Quest? Trizbort is open source and written in C#. The Inform 7 export file is less than 400 lines...

Sorry Silver I meant that as a friendly poke only..

Yes my point was specifically mapping tools. I think I will try Trizbort first.

I was asking because ultimately my goal is to develop quite advanced games, so most likely involving a distributed team, so that will need the right scalable tools.

On that note and it won't be for a wee while yet, but if there's any one fancies a bit of contract work to develop games give me a shout.. I'd like to understand work efforts, rates etc required to produce games..

cheers Neil.