E-Publishing - Week 7

Week seven is the Univeristy's reading week so there was no E-Publishing lecture this week. The lack of lecture gave me some time to think about what I might want to do for my final project. After learning about Interactive Fiction last week I think that that is the route that I would like to go down for my final project as it ties in with other modules I've taken in University including ones to do with games and virtual environments and also new media. I found the lecture on Interactive Fiction last week very interesting and informative and definitely something that I would like to try doing myself.

So I decided to look more into Interactive Fiction. Interactive Fiction being a form of software, where there is typically a simulated environment and characters that are controlled by simple text commands such as "look around" or "pick up....". The whole 'game' or 'narrative' is entirely text based and is usually in the form of an adventure story. Interactive fiction was most popular during the late 1970s to the mid 1980s and is known as being the oldest form of computer gaming.

Using the software that we were shown in lecture six I decided to have another go at trying to create a virtual JP Hall (the Creative Studies building). Again the process was extremely slow and very frustrating. I can only imagine how long it must take to create an entire game. I seem to have been working on this for hours and all I've managed to do is get my character to look at a vending machine. It is fairly safe to say that if I will be creating an interactive fiction based final project I shall have to start studying the tutorial manual for the software over the next few weeks in an attempt to familiarise myself with the commands.

Ooh it's going to be a busy christmas!!!