Category Archives: prose

The Imitable Process of Ryan Veeder: Additional Autosaving Techniques for Inform 7

There are a few more things I should say about implementing autosaving in Inform 7. In the previous posts I neglected to address how these techniques interact with the default verbs UNDO, SAVE, and RESTORE, which was a bit of an oversight. I’ll get around to that now, and then I’ll show you a couple of other neat things you can do with autosaving.

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The Imitable Process of Ryan Veeder: Advanced Autosaving in Inform 7

In a previous post I explicated the basic principles of how to automatically track and restore the player’s progress in an Inform 7 game. What it really comes down to is this:

  • Represent the parameters of your game’s progression in a table.
  • Whenever the player does something worth autosaving, record it in that table, and then write that table to an external file.
  • When play begins, read that external file and use those data to reconstruct the player’s progress.

I said we’d get into some ways of representing progress in a nonlinear game. The first thing that comes to mind is my game The Lurking Horror II: The Lurkening, in which the player character learns various spells that let you manipulate the environment and solve puzzles. Learning certain spells requires you to learn certain other spells first, but the “tech tree” has enough branches that we can’t predict in what order the player will discover everything.

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The Imitable Process of Ryan Veeder: Basic Autosaving in Inform 7

Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing autosaves your progress! This is kind of noteworthy, at least in the realm of text adventures. I don’t think Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing is the first text adventure to autosave your progress, but it might be the first game to do it in Inform 7.

Why bother with this feature for this particular game? Well, it was kind of necessary to make another feature work: Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing also uses the real-world date for certain “real-time” elements. The game can’t really keep track of these elements (say, counting how many different days you’ve played) if players are able to “change history” by loading outdated save files.

But there’s another reason, one which may more likely be applicable to your own personal design interests: Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing is supposed to be an extremely casual experience. There is no urgency for the player to reach the ending. (There is no ending.) It’s not supposed to be a battle of wits between the author and the player. You’re meant to visit the world of Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing for however long you want, whenever you feel like it, and maybe you’ll make some “progress” by finding something new, or maybe you won’t. It’s supposed to be very chill.

Requiring players to manually save their state at the end of a play session and then restore their state the next time they show up (being careful not to restore an old file and lose progress!) would detract from the casual experience I wanted to create. So it was doubly important for me to take the burden of progress management off the players’ shoulders.

Maybe you’d like to do something similar with your own Inform 7 project. Here’s how you can do that!

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Profiles in Jazz: Adam Belstrom

Adam Belstrom puts his socks on one at a time. “I don’t know of any other way to do it,” he says.

Adam is shorter than you’d expect, neater and better dressed than you want him to be. An experimental jazz musician should have facial hair; he doesn’t. He should be living in a messy studio apartment, not a duplex near a church.

I show Adam a neat way of putting on both socks at once. He agrees that it’s neat. Then I make him do it a couple of times, so I know he’s internalized it. He thanks me, tentatively. I tell him he should do it that way from now on. He says “sure,” and I can tell he has no such plans.

“It’s a structure built out of chaos.

Bismarck, North Dakota: No epicenter of artistic innovation—or so you’d think. Adam Belstrom is turning that assumption upside down, with a little help from his family. Every Saturday night, at Bismarck’s experimental jazz club The Sponge, Adam Belstrom debuts a new composition. Each piece is 500 notes long, and each note is chosen by Adam’s infant cousin Marquisha.

“My brain is formless,” Marquisha says, in sign language interpreted by her mother Hester, Adam’s aunt. “Jazz is formless. That’s not completely true. Jazz has structure. But it’s a structure built out of chaos. A baby like me is a perfect composer of jazz music.”

Marquisha’s composing process involves throwing ball bearings into a sand pit in Hester’s back yard. (During North Dakota’s frigid winters, the sand pit is brought into the living room.) On Sunday morning, Marquisha is given a bag of 500 ball bearings; over the course of the week, she eventually throws all of them into the sand pit. When the bag is empty, Hester and Adam photograph the pit and use Photoshop to overlay the array of circles onto a blank page of staff paper.

“We don’t have a Photoshop license,” Adam tells me, “so you should probably just say we use an image editing program. Or, just say ‘a computer.'”

“I’m listening to the ball. It’s like a Zen thing.

Once Marquisha’s composition is transcribed, her mother uses a special rake to remove the balls from the sand pit and pours them back into the bag. Adam spends the rest of the week—however long that ends up being—rehearsing the music in preparation for Saturday night’s performance.

The ball bearings don’t always cooperate.

“Sometimes, a ball doesn’t want to be music,” Marquisha, now eighteen months old, explains. “Sometimes I throw the ball at Mommy, and she gets upset. But it’s because I’m listening to the ball. It’s like a Zen thing. I’m throwing it where it needs to be thrown.”

When this happens, Hester puts the steel sphere back in its bag, so that Marquisha can throw it again, hopefully into the sand pit. Her reasoning is simple: “Every song needs to be five hundred notes.”

What if Saturday night rolls around and Marquisha hasn’t thrown all the ball bearings into the sand yet? Hester brushes the question aside; such a thing “would never happen.”

Though he refuses to take even partial credit as composer, Adam does think of himself and Marquisha as creative partners. “Her fingers are too small to play the guitar. We got her a toy guitar for her birthday, but she can only strum an open chord right now.”

“When she’s older, she’ll play her own compositions,” says Hester. But Marquisha flails her arms emphatically, and Hester translates: “Mother, don’t you dare tell me what I’m going to do.”


It’s Saturday night. I and four other music critics are crowded around The Sponge’s tiny stage. Adam Belstrom arrives, ten minutes late. (Later I will deduce that he has just finished an argument with his girlfriend Sam, who will decline to be interviewed.) He arranges the pages of Marquisha’s music, six sheets of paper spread across two music stands. He clears his throat and begins to play.

I’ve heard from Hester that Marquisha only finished this composition this morning. Adam has had, at most, twelve hours to rehearse—and that’s not accounting for his argument with Sam.

The music has no melody, no tonality. Adam’s fingers struggle to accommodate Marquisha’s incredibly dense note clusters; I recall craters in the sand pit where ten or twelve ball bearings had gathered in little heaps.

I turn my attention from the stage for a moment, and I notice that Geof Yards, of Crawdaddy Magazine, is copying my notes. I cover my Moleskine with my hand. He pretends not to notice.

Geof Yards is a plagiarizing piece of garbage.

When the performance is over, I grab Geof’s notebook and throw it across the room. While he’s occupied, I move in for a final interview with Adam. He seems distracted. The only quote I can get out of him is “Thanks a lot for coming all the way out here.”

Outside, it’s dark already, and snowflakes dance under the orange streetlights. What a surprise: It’s snowing in North Dakota.

The Betsy Morrison Story

a Twitter novel
by Ryan Veeder
copyright Ryan Veeder MMXVII

The wind blew across the elementary school playground. It blew the orange leaves up against the wire fence. The leaves rustled.

Betsy Morrison wrote in her diary.

“I am a twelve-year-old girl,” she wrote, “the wisest creature upon Earth. I understand the languages of birds, the ebb and flow of the seasons, the past and the future and the space beyond time. Today is my birthday, and I am twelve years old.

“We went to Garbaggio’s Pizzeria for my birthday over the weekend because it was Uncle Boscoe’s birthday last week and we celebrated them at the same time but my REAL birthday is today,” Betsy continued to write, leaves swirling around her ankles, “and I am perfect among humans.”

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UNCOVERED: Crocodracula!

UPDATE OCTOBER 30: YOU CAN PLAY THIS GAME. But read below so you know what the deal is:

If you’re the right age then you definitely remember Crocodracula, the terrifying soap opera for kids from the early nineties. If you’re too old, or too young, or your parents (wisely???) prevented you from watching, the show was a lot like Land of the Lost, but in a kind of modern gothic horror mode instead of cavemen and dinosaurs. I’ve also heard it described as “Dark Shadows for tweens” but I don’t know how accurate that assessment is.

HOWEVER, even nineties kids don’t necessarily remember that there was at least one Crocodracula computer game, released by Taleframe in 1991. I say “at least one” because the title, “Crocodracula: What Happened to Calvin,” makes it sound like they were at least planning to release other games, possibly based on other episodes/story arcs from the show. It’s hard to tell. Crocodracula information is really hard to come by for some reason.

The point is, I now have a copy of this game.

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Halloween Zeen 2017

BEWARE: The new Halloween Zeen is out!

A lot of really cool people contributed a lot of really cool stuff to this year’s Zeen. Plus there is a board game that I didn’t do a very good job of designing. BUT THE OTHER STUFF IS RAD. CHECK IT OUT.

Luddites of Gich, Part 3

“It was those luddites,” Heldeb grumbled. “They’ve got themselves some new old-fashioned contraption. An impossibly loud one.”

These remarks were directed toward a nebrium-plated breakfast droid, which, detecting Heldeb’s frustration, extended two shiny pseudopods to rub his temples.

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