My own Interactive Fiction Piece

My Interactive Fiction production was about a teacher who was just beginning to work in a daycare which is full of toddlers, meaning two year olds. There are four girls and four boys giving you a total of eight. One boy as well as one girl was the characters that I had used throughout this piece. The males name was Kevin and the females name was Sam. The whole reason why I made this Interactive Fiction the way that I did was because I wanted to show people how much work it is to work with two years especially when one of them gets hurt. I have been working in the toddler room at Eastern Connecticut’s daycare for just about two years and I have had many experiences of the one that I shared in IF. My basic plan was to set up a normal morning that a teacher may have had and explain what a teacher may have to do if a child got hurt. I wanted to show the setup of the room, and try to give a brief description of the room that the children were entering and what they would do when they directly went into the classroom, take off their coats. I want to make things sensory and have the player be able to pick up things as well as bring them to people, which I was able to do in this piece. I only know how to use IF a little bit so it would not have been in depth but I wanted my player to understand what they were supposed to do as well as where they were supposed to go after certain events took place. I wanted to add open and close doors to my Interactive fiction piece, but I was not able to figure it out and make it work with the program.

I thought that making interactive fiction was the hardest computer program that I have ever worked on. It made me feel like I was computer illiterate. I am okay with computers but this was way too hard. Without an example by my side, using it for guidelines, I don’t think I would have been able to work this out. I was not able to figure out all of the relevant capabilities especially not on my own. I used the help files text support and a reading that we had last class which is called the Inform7 handbook, below at the end of this paragraph there is a picture of the page where this handbook is at. I also had the help of my professor, without her help, I probably would not have been able to figure out how to make a character a character as well as giving the ice to Kevin. Those were the trickiest things for me to figure out. Doing about ten minutes in an Interactive piece took a very long time to do and was very frustrating. I use computers a decent amount of time and this program was very different than anything that I am used to. It is a whole new experience.

Without this software I would not have been able to make a Interactive Piece and I think that the piece that I did, (even though it is nothing like other IF’s that I have seen), a decent job making rooms, having things that are within my room and bringing ice to a character. Without IF I would have never been able to do this, and I think it is interesting to learn about, even if it is incredibly hard to figure out. I realized while working on this piece that I wanted to talk about a lot of different things and I became very creative at one point in my thinking, but I could not figure out how to incorporate it into my piece. I wanted to have my kids open a door and take off their shoes, but that was way too complicated to figure out in the beginning of using IF. I think if I learn the manual of IF then I will be able to figure out a lot more information and how to do a lot more techniques that can be interesting and will bring my toddler room IF to life, which is shown below.

There were a lot of things that frustrated me while working with IF. First of all, I had an extremely difficult time working with this program. This had to have been the hardest concept to grasp with a computer program. There are so many details that you had to put out and you had to make sure that each concept that you wanted to talk about would be grasped not only by the reader but also by the computer. You had to type to the computer in black and then to the reader in blue, and you had to make sure that each time that you are doing this, that the wording would be understood by the Interactive guidelines. This was not easy to do and the attempts that I made were extremely difficult to figure out. When I thought that I finally got it right and that my piece was going to work, I waited one minute and well something went wrong and now I had to go and fix the problem. I think the hardest part though was trying to figure out which way to type thing to make sure that the IF program will understand what you are trying to tell it, most of the time it did not understand. I felt like it was a whole new way of talking, and it was just special to IF. You have to literally spell things out in order to get them to work and you have to define what things are like teacher, or boy and girl. And I think that is the hardest part because you really have to pay close attention to everything you are going to say or do and if you do not, then it will take you a long time to figure out what you did wrong later. While I was doing my Interactive Fiction piece I kept thinking to myself saying, “I give the people who make IF a lot of props for putting all the time that they do in,” because from doing it myself I have learned that it is not easy at all to create. It is the hardest computer program that I have ever worked with and even after working on it for a very long time, I still feel like I don’t understand a great deal of what I am supposed to do, because there are so many little things that are needed to be done to make a sentence work, and if you mess up one thing in that sentence then the whole thing will not work and light up, and then it’s back to the drawing board. This first picture is a picture of a mistake that I had made over and over and was trying to figure out what exactly I needed to do to make this room work, and the second picture is when I finally figured out how to fix it.

I realized that IF is really different than writing a short story, because you have the idea that you want to use, and now you have to tell it to the computer and the reader to make sure that it is clear to them what exactly you are trying to tell. I think that I would have rather had written a story because it would have been easier to do and wouldn’t have been so much work to try to tell the computer what exactly I wanted it to know. But then again, I think that IF had made my piece more interesting and outgoing because you are able to make different rooms and give descriptions of a character right there so that the reader could examine him or her. And also, I liked the fact that I was able to make different rooms and tell the computer exactly what I wanted it to know in order for it to explain to the reader. I have mixed feelings towards this because I think that I would want to do IF instead of writing a short story but then again, I do not know how to use IF exactly to the point of where I know what to say exactly where I should say it, and that is when it gets complicated, tricky and makes me not want to participate in it. The picture below show a beginning stage after I finally got all of the tricks and complications out, when you press go, this is what the screen goes to and then you can play your game just as if you are the player.

Finally, I liked learning about IF and all of the gadgets that could be used for this game as well as the way you could use this game for stories and presenting things, but when this class is over, I do not think that I will be using this program again, because it is a lot of work and I still do not understand it, even after I have put hours and hours of time in it. If I understood the information of this game and how each thing works I would continue with it, but I do not understand it, so I do not think I will be continuing with IF after this class.