The Warbler's Nest

This repository contains the source and skein files of The Warbler's Nest, an interactive fiction by Jason McIntosh. The author shares them in order to provide those interested in Inform with a complete, ready-to-compile example of non-trivial scope.

If you just want to play the game, you don't want to be here. Visit the game's homepage instead.

About the game

The Warbler's Nest was originally written as an entry to the 2010 interactive fiction competition. Since then it won 2010's XYZZY Award for Best Story, and has been commercially adapted to iOS by way of Andrew Plotkin's IosFizmo.

The game is quite short, taking perhaps about half an hour for an experienced player to explore thoroughly. Obviously, the author recommends that you play the game at least once before reading the source code.

About the code

This code is not beautiful or well organized. The author learned Inform 7 while writing this game, and shipped the game's first version before reading a book about Inform 7 best practices with its corresponding example code (which happens to be an excellent game in its own right).

That said, the code in this repository works, and demonstrates various (though by no means all) key features of the Inform language and development system. This includes a complete skein file that acts as an effective regression-test suite for the game, leading its automated player down every significant story-path.

What's included

This source release includes:

• This README file, and a corresponding LICENSE file.

• A Warbler.inform bundle, ready for opening with the Inform IDE. It contains the story source and the skein, more or less as it stood when I finished creating the game in 2010.

• The game's cover art.

Making it go

First, download and install the latest release of Inform in a matter befitting your computer. Then open warbler.inform with Inform. Poof, you should see the story's source code in the Inform IDE. Hitting the IDE's Go! button should, indeed, compile the game and make it go.

Contributors

Thanks to Paul Vaughan for helping to update the story sourse for compatibility with Inform 7 version 6L38.

License

This work is copyright (c) 2010-2015 by Jason McIntosh.

For more details, please see the file LICENSE.md, found in the same directory as the file you are now reading.