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[Hayden Scott-Baron]

A friend of mine is keen to get into Interactive Fiction, but is scared of programming.

Is 'Inform' the best thing for her to use?
http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Welcome.html

Does anyone have any pointers as to how she should get started?

[increpare]

A friend of mine is keen to get into Interactive Fiction, but is scared of programming.

Is 'Inform' the best thing for her to use?

Inform 7?  Almost certainly.  Not sure where the best place to start is.  I think the documentation has tutorials &c. in it, though maybe there're better resources online.  Other peeps here have such things fresher in their memories, so I'll not bother myself looking stuff up.

[Titch]

I would recommend ADRIFT over Inform 7. It's interface makes it much easier to plan as you go, even though it doesn't really lend itself to some of the more wacky IF mechanics.

As fun as I find Inform 7 is gets super picky over grammar and sentence structure. Which makes things harder in the long run (it IS more portable though).

I've just started fooling around with Inform myself. I would suggest reading this and following along making something of your own. Learning wise the manual structure isn't that great, it's best to skip the first chapter as it's mostly unnecessary guff and information about advanced features. In an ideal world you would probably want to work your way through the first seven or eight chapters to get an overview. In reality it's a lot of stuff to take in n_n.

[Terry]

Inform 7 is quite easy to get started with, and the actual documentation that accompanies it is great; very clear and unambitious and should be pretty much all she needs

In the past I've heard that a tool called ADRIFT is about the easiest way to get started with IF (it's supposed to be kind of a drag and drop affair), but I've never actually used it myself and a couple of people I know who've tried it said they found it kinda confusing; still, it might be worth a look if she's really allergic to programming

The other big IF environments are TADS3 (which is by all accounts excellent, though maybe a bit tech-ier than INFORM) and ALAN, which a few people used for Text the Halls and which is supposed to be quite easy to pick up - though I don't know a whole lot about it myself. It has a kind of BASIC like syntax.

[Terry]

Ah, and as Titch mentions, good and all as the Inform documentation is it's a little... comprehensive I found it best to just jump in and starting writing stuff as soon as possible while skimming the documentation.

[Hayden Scott-Baron]

Ah, thanks for the tips with regards to Inform. I'll be sure to pass that information on to her so that she has a more pleasant starting experience with it.

I think I'll hold off on recommended ADRIFT just yet... partially because I don't want to confuse her with multiple suggestions, and also because she seemed quite taken by the notion of natural english definitions of objects and locations in Inform.

But largely because ADRIFT's logo makes me want to poke my eyes out!



....

...BLEEEAAAAARRRRGGHHH *vomits everywhere*

I'm serious about this, that logo makes me doubt the integrity of the software, and the screenshots didn't do much to sway me either.

[Terry]

Haha, can't argue with that :D