This means keeping many trails open at once, inevitably requiring a fairly ‘parallel’ plot. This plot should be discovered rather than announced, so show, don’t tell. Graham Nelson Read Quote
For a fortnight nobody at all emailed me, or posted a follow-up. Doesn’t anyone care, I thought? It turned out my newsreader was broken, and hadn’t posted at all. Graham Nelson Read Quote
The most frequent complaint is that it’s hard. True. it’s a hard game to win Also, many people ask me how to use the secret debugging commands, apparently under the impression that I’ll tell them. Graham Nelson Read Quote
The ‘interactive fiction’ format hasn’t changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn’t since 1700. Graham Nelson Read Quote
Players very widely disagree with me about what’s hard and what’s easy. and in a way, ‘I won, but it was a fight’ is the best compliment a game can receive. Graham Nelson Read Quote
If you’re setting a game during the Cuban Missile Crisis, look through a library. find out what people were wearing, what other issues were in the news, how houses were furnished, what cars were being driven. Especially include things which now seem foreign. Graham Nelson Read Quote
If pushed, though, I’d say that the next stage will be reached when it it’s no longer true that about 75% of the best games were written in 1980’s on the way to that. Graham Nelson Read Quote
I’m rather pleased with the new manuals. I see Inform now as a gauche young adult, having got past the stage of growing out of his shoes every few months. Graham Nelson Read Quote
I try to make puzzles range all the way from easy to hard, and to leave many open at once. Graham Nelson Read Quote
I like to employ a form of repetition, in which the same elements recur but in different and unexpected ways. rather than being discarded as soon as they are understood or passed over. Graham Nelson Read Quote
