wadeclarke.com rebuilt and Time Warp extension for Inform 7

I just completed a new look renovation of my website and added an interactive fiction page while I was at it. The IF page is a simple hub of my games, tools, sites and blogs.

If you've not had a look over my creative projects before, I'd welcome your visit to my new site:

wadeclarke.com

Time Warp

In IF-dom, I am making available an Inform 7 extension called Time Warp. What it does: It puts a whole CYOA game I wrote on the Apple II+ when I was 12 or 13 into your game. Time Warp has lots of great endings like – 'YOU'VE GOT A LIFE-TIME AHEAD OF YOU...IN GAOL!' – all in the CYOA / Fighting Fantasy / Be An Interplanetary Spy vein.

It's all caps because the text was retrieved verbatim from the Apple II+ game, where all the text was all caps. Not a word, typo, punctuation or 40-character line justification has been revised.

Why would you want Time Warp in your game? Well, if it fits the aesthetic, why not? This would be a move in the tradition of Call of Duty: Black Ops, which had the whole of Zork in it as an easter egg, introduced by you interacting with an old computer in the game world. So in that case, your character was playing Zork.

I ported Time Warp to Inform 7 so I could make it an easter egg in Leadlight Gamma. I put an unlockable Apple II+ in the game's school.

Time Warp won't interfere with your game code. Just include the extension, then, at the point you want Time Warp to start, use the phrase 'run time warp'. I've put a demo online showing how you could embed it in an in-game computer prop:

wadeclarke.com/ifdemos/time_warp/

That site also has the link to the extension. You can right-click it and save as Time Warp.i7x

I'd enjoy seeing Time Warp show up as a diversion in an I7 game, or as a diversion in a bunch of games. In any case, this extension may just give you the idea for writing your own self-contained, reusable extension game. Or, if you want to write a really simple keypress CYOA by somewhat hacky means, look at the Time Warp code.

(You might be aware that I will be releasing a full-featured and non-hacky CYOA extension for Inform 7 in the not-too-distant future. The Time Warp way of doing things isn't suitable for anything robust or complex.)