I was excited to see how well the Quest game Jacqueline, Jungle Queen did in the recent IFComp. However I was less excited to read this written by the game's author,

It looks like the number of people who could vote on it was limited due to it being in Quest; I didn't have enough time to learn a new system before the competition, but I have been working with Inform, which has a steeper learning curve at the beginning but makes it a lot easier to do certain more complicated things, so I hope to have much livelier and more interactive environments in my next game (as well as the game being playable offline to more people).

I want to make clear that I have no problem with an author using whatever tool they want to write IF, I'm more interested in the end result really. But as someone who thinks Quest is more capable than many people seem to believe, feedback like this from a successful Quest author is disheartening. I think that those of us who like and use Quest should try to grow a community of skilled writers of Quest games, and if we're losing good authors to other systems it's like one step forward, two steps back.

Just addressing the quote above, there are two issues: a perception that Quest can't do more complicated things with as much ease as systems such as Inform, and that you can't play Quest offline on Mac and Linux.

I have some ideas on possible improvements on these two points, but I'd like hear what you all think first.

I think the initial problem was that the author submitted the game as download only. This was later rectified with a link to an online submission. I don't know enough about inform to compare it to Quest. I do know that in some quarters it is seen as the go to software for *serious* IF developers. Alongside the parser vs hyperlink debates there seems to be an elitist view of which tools should be used - to the extent that I've seen people complain that inform 7 is "too easy" when compared with inform 6. Complaining about a tool being too easy to get to grips with is pretty revealing of a certain mentality within the IF community. Why use an easy tool when there's more difficult ones to get a job done, for us clever people?

So I don't know what problems Quest threw up that inform solves - although for sure all software has its strengths and weaknesses - but there is certainly pressure for people to be using certain systems if they expect to be taken seriously.

Inform is a programming language. The authors have disguised that by making the syntax resemble English, eg (from here):

The Stateroom is a room. "Staterooms aboard a spaceship, even one as luxurious as the Thaleia, are tight, cramped affairs, and this one is no exception. There is barely enough room for you and the furniture. The door to the hallway is locked tight for now. East is your bathroom."

The Bathroom is east of the Stateroom. The description is "Like your stateroom in smallness, only moreso. There is a mirror on one wall."

But like any programming language, you have to know what it expects and you have to type it just right. Behind the Inform 7 code is Inform 6 (I think), which is a rather more traditional programming language.

Quest takes a different approach, giving a GUI, with boxes to fill in, but behind that again there is the code. I prefer Quest because there is less writing!

Look at this example, and think how much quicker it would be to do in Quest:
http://elit.umwblogs.org/2012/02/24/opt ... -inform-7/

Inform has a large community that has created a number of good quality extensions (which I think have to be in Inform 6!), and perhaps this is where Quest is lacking (it has the facilities for library but not the community to build and maintain them). I have yet to hear about anything Quest cannot do.

I'm now entertaining thoughts of conspiracy theories over this.

A new user:
Creates a first IF game that goes into top games and persists there.
Second game comes third in IF comp.
Statement: Now I have your attention I think inform will be much better for this sort of thing.
Radio silence.

Join the dots.

I think one of the things that attracts authors to Inform is simply the fact that in that community you get more players giving meaningful feedback. At least I know that if I spent months slaving over a project I'd rather have one or two huge detailed reviews (even critical ones) by people who obviously took their time exploring and thinking about the game than 10 different variations of 'awesome game was fun' or 'how I get out of room plz i cant figure it ou???' or something like that.

I suppose that is problematic and something only we as a community can fix. I'm a bit cautious about it because you can give constructive criticism and people don't always like it. When they say 'test this and give feedback' want they want is 'wow, that's really brilliant!' and not 'well you can improve it by...'

This is why having trusted beta testers is a good idea. People who will be honest and help you see the game from a different pov. The review section is simply that. At best someone will write something lengthy but more often than not people will give a twitter-length comment or say nothing at all. I don't see that as Quest specific tbh as there's plenty of games on IFDB that have short or no reviews whatsoever.

You can always post your game link on intfiction.org in the announcements section. And list it in IFDB. Just because it's a Quest game doesn't mean you can only announce it on the Quest site.

Or submit to a comp.

The IFDB is a wiki and so you're going to find reviews and games of all kinds there, but there's still that subset of the main community that takes IF very, very, seriously. IMO a little TOO serious sometimes but they still put out some amazing reviews and commentary...I think it's a holdover from the late 90s and early 2000s when a review was an article you published on your site or in the newsletter, not just some first impressions you typed really quick in a comment box. (Seriously read through some old issues of the SPAG newsletter sometime, it's been dead a few years but it's really impressive how professional it all was and it made a big impression on me how dedicated everyone was to IF as an art form back when I first started playing...)

jaynabonne wrote:You can always post your game link on intfiction.org in the announcements section. And list it in IFDB. Just because it's a Quest game doesn't mean you can only announce it on the Quest site.

Or submit to a comp.

oh heck no that would be terrifying