On top of writing games, I am also an active member of the interactive fiction community, writing articles and code.
Articles
I have written several essays in English which were published in several places:
- (2011) Racontons une histoire ensemble: History and Characteristics of French IF, an essay in English I wrote for the IF Theory Reader (edited by Kevin Jackson-Mead and J. Robinson Wheeler, Transcript on Press, march 2011) about the history of French IF. The essay focuses on interactive fiction in French in the 1980s, discussing the origins of the genre and its specificities, as well as the contemporary French IF scene and its influences.
- For the French translation, see here.
- (2015) >JUSTIFY, HEIGHTEN, SAY YES: Interactive Fiction as Improv [PDF], an essay in English that made the cover on issue 62 of SPAG magazine (edited by Katherine Morayati, whom I thank deeply for her work!). This essay is about some parallels between interactive fiction (more precisely, parser-based text adventures) and improv theatre, and uses principles from the latter to think about some aspects of designing such games.
- (2016) SPAG Specifics: Paolo Chikiamco’s “Slammed!” [PDF], a review in English published in issue 62 of SPAG magazine (also edited by Katherine Morayati, thanks again!). This is a review of the Choice of Games game, which does a great job at conveying the atmosphere of professional wrestling, although I was disappointed about what was (or, rather, wasn’t) done in the female wrestler route.
- (2016) >SOLVE ZORK: Teaching An AI To Play Parser IF [PDF], an essay in English published in issue 64 of SPAG magazine (once again, edited by Katherine Morayati, thank you!). This essay is inspired by recent advances in AI brought by deep learning, and attempts to give an idea of the skills an AI would have to learn in order to get good at playing parser games; teaching an AI to play these games would give it advanced skills and something resembling common sense, which would be an interesting development!
I also wrote a few dozen reviews on the IFDB, some of them quite long.
Since the summer of 2017 and the launch of the new website of the French-speaking interactive fiction community, I have written columns (in French) for the website a few times a month. You can read all my articles here; there are Inform 6 tutorials, Twine 2 tutorials, things about the French IF community, or interactive fiction in general… I have written around 60 articles, amounting to 80,000 words; I try to cover various aspects of interactive fiction (history, formats, practices, technical stuff, etc.), and I think I know my stuff pretty well.
Code
Source code of my games
One of the best ways to learn Inform 6 is to read other people’s code. Here’s a zip file with the source code of all my games; I also converted them in more readable Web pages (with syntax highlighting) using Pygments:
- Les espions ne meurent jamais
- Même les pommes de terre ont des yeux
- Ma princesse adorée
- Châtiment divin
- Divine bonace
- Brrr!
- La femme qui ne supportait pas les ordinateurs
- Un jeu d’enfant
- Homeland Security (1 2 3 4)
- Life on Mars? (1 2)
- Heading East
- Tipelau (1 2 3 4)
Inform 6 extensions
I wrote a few Inform 6 extensions, which are in their own Bitbucket repository. Some extensions that might be of interest to you are:
• PhraseNames, an extension which allows you to extend and complexify the recognized names for an object;
• EffetsDeTexte, an extension for all kinds of text effects (colors, timed effects, etc.);
• OneWordParsing, an extension to bypass traditional input mode and make a verbless game like Walker and Silhouette.
I also wrote a few Inform 6 extensions for Vorple, in order to perform a few effects; you can find them, along with other extensions, in this Github repository.
Libraries for Inform 6 in French
I am also the maintainer of the French-speaking Inform 6 librairies; you can find them in this repository. Right now the version of the librairies 6/11; there’s still a bit of work to do before having them at version 6/12.
Translation tools
I also have developed tools to help translate interactive fiction; these tools are Python scripts you can use to translate Inform 6, Inform 7 or Twine. These tools allow you to extract the text from source code into a .po file, so that you can work on the translation without messing with the code; this is useful if you do not know these programming languages, or if you want to avoid inadvertently introducing bugs in the code while working on it. You can find these tools on my Translations page, or directly from the Bitbucket repository.