This week our assignment was to recreate a scene or location in Inform7. I decided to recreate a scene from Axolotl, a short story by Julio Cortazar (Spanish here and English here). I love the magical realism writers from El Boom Latinoamericano and the writings from these authors touch on a lot of the themes we have been talking about with time, nonlinearity, branching narratives and hypertext. I am also developing this story in VR for another class, so was interested to see story can be broken down into smaller interactions and steps that guide the reader/immersant.
In this story, a man visits an aquarium in France and becomes obsessed with the axolotls. He continues to visit them, staring into their eyes and contemplating what their thoughts might be. Eventually he becomes an axolotl.
I was interested to see how a stripped down medium of interactive text could guide the reader/player through the actions of this man. Initially I wanted to start with the man biking the streets of Paris, but this became too many steps to start with, so I started inside the Zoo. At first I was going to have one “room” and have all the animal exhibits in the same room and the user could approach, but I found it easier to keep track of and more interesting to create multiple rooms to explore.
I wanted to make an animal class and have the actions you could take on the animal depend on the kind of animal, but found this way of coding a bit confusing and could not resolve the errors I was getting when trying to write if statements for these conditions.
In the end I decided to create a boolean to indicate whether the animal is an axolotl or not in order to differentiate the actions you can take on it. It seems a bit inefficient the way I have it set up though. I’d also like to “unlock” certain actions once others have been performed and again am doing this a couple times with booleans, but it seems like there is probably a better way. For example, right now you can “stare”, “tap” and “continue staring” at the axolotl without approaching it first, but I’d like to make approaching a condition for these other actions. I’d also like “continue staring” to only be possible after you have tried staring, maybe even a few times.
You can play the game here: https://lydiajessup.github.io/inform-sketch/play.html
Try:
Greet
Contemplate
Approach
Stare
Tap
Continue Staring