Zaki Adventures: About Adrift
01-Oct-2006: Please note that some information on this page are outdated. The last update to this article was on 20 November 2005.
Adrift is a tool for writing Interactive Fiction (IF, also known as text adventures). While there are many possible ways for writing IF, Adrift is my favourite. This page is intended to give newcomers a brief overview of the world of Interactive Fiction, with a special coverage of Adrift.
What is Interactive Fiction?
There's not much I can add to the above description. Interactive Fiction is a rather old form of gameplay, and had its peak during the 80ties, when it was developed commercially by companies like Infocom. With the advance of point-and-click adventures and graphical adventures, their common ancestor disappeared. But good things don't just vanish. Thanks to many enthusiasts, Interactive Fiction had its own comeback during the mid-90ties, and while not commercially viable, the scene is still alive to this day.In interactive fiction you play the main character of a story. You type commands which determine the actions of the character and the flow of the plot. Some IF games include graphics, but most do not: the imagery is provided courtesy of your imagination. On the other hand, there's a wide range of action available. Whereas in other games you may be restricted to restricted to shooting monsters, moving around, or searching items, IF allows you a wide range of verbs.
Interactive fiction comes in a wide variety of types and genres. There are IF mysteries, thrillers, romances, and science fiction stories. There are games about espionage, games about fighting dragons, games about being a cat burglar or searching an abandoned house for loot. Some pieces are fairly serious and literary, while others are enjoyable romps. You can experiment until you find something that suits your own tastes.
Quoted from Brass Lantern - A Beginner's Guide to Interactive Fiction
Getting into Interactive Fiction may be hard, and new players are well advised to read the above Beginner's Guide to Interactive Fiction, and trying out games needs patience and time. But for those who have mastered this, a world full of magic, suspense and mystery is the reward. Thanks to the effort of many committed people, a broad spectrum of good games - both old and new - can be legally obtained from the Internet.
Sooner or later, many players of IF also want to become writer themselves. The main systems for writing IF today are Inform and TADS. Inform is a further development of the very same system used by Infocom for well-known games like Zork, while TADS is a independently developed language. There are many alternatives to these two development systems, among them of course my much beloved Adrift.
What is Adrift?
Written by Campbell Wild, Adrift is a toolkit for Interactive Fiction. It consists of a runner and a generator. The runner is needed to play games written with Adrift. It's a free tool available for Microsoft Windows. Non-Windows users can use Scare, an inofficial interpreter of the Adrift runner for other platforms.The Generator is the real heart of Adrift, as this is the application which is used to create text adventures. Its biggest advantage is the easy-to-use graphical Interface:
In addition, the Generator also has several multimedia features, and allows the addition of music and graphic files into adventures. The Adrift generator, as opposed to the free runner, is shareware.ADRIFT Generator is a program written for Windows 95/98/NT/2K/ME/XP which allows you to create your own Text Adventures. Instead of having to learn a new adventure programming language, ADRIFT Generator takes all the difficulty away leaving you with a simple, yet powerful game designer. Adventures are built up by adding rooms, objects, tasks, events and characters. All you have to do is type in the descriptions, and select how everything interacts with each other from pull down menus and lists.
Quoted from the official Adrift site
The Adrift Community
The Adrift community is a great place to be, full of friendly people with various backgrounds. Most users and authors are from Great Britain and the United States, and so the lingua franca of the Adrift world is English.The main Adrift site plays the biggest role in the live of most users of Adrift (commonly referred to as drifters). It's the place to look out for new games and check for updates of the generator/runner. The forum is the place where you can meet fellow drifters for discussions, help, support and encouragement. A regularly feature of the forum is the bi-monthly writing challenge, where new and veteran authors alike can practise and improve their writing skills.
Should the pace of the forum be too slow, the newly founded IRC channel #adrift on the EFNET netwerk might be the right place to look for a more direct and personal contact with many drifters. If you are not yet familiar with IRC, the easiest way to access the chat is through the online java applet on the InsideAdrift page.
If you are looking for news, gossip and well thought-out articles, look no further than the InsideAdrift newsletter. Being published bi-monthly, this newsletter gives a good overview over the current situation of Adrift, its history and possible future. If you know a good program for Adrift, have an opinion to voice or something else to share, why don't you write an article for the InsideAdrift?
The Reviews Exchange is a zine available quarterly as online file or pdf. As the name already suggests, the Reviews Exchange wants to provide readers with reviews of new games, and give the writers some feedback. Although clearly aimed at the Adrift scene, reviews of other Interactive Fiction games are also welcome. Its sympathic subtitle, 'a collection of reviews of Adrift games which people have written but they might not necessarily be all adrift games that people are writing reviews of', emerged on this thread on the Adrift forum, and proves that only free voting can lead to real democrazy. Like with the InsideAdrift newsletter, the idea behind the Reviews Exchange is that of team work. If you recently have played a game, try to write a review!
Once you have read all the reviews, you probably want to try out some of the games. Many of them can be downloaded from the official Adrift site. Other possible sources are shadowvault and delron.org.uk, both offer a collection of most (if not all) Adrift games released, together with some reviews and recommendations.
Knowledge is power, and for Adrift, DriftOn, a wiki for and about Adrift, is the place to get and share this power. DriftOn also has a very useful list with recommended games, which might be a good place for starters to enjoy some good games and see what's possible with Adrift. While DriftOn is mainly targeted at all things Adrift, the IFWiki has a wider spectrum of topics.
The Competitions
Some authors like to release their finished game independently. Others, however, like to enter their work into competitions (Comp for short). Competitions have many advantages. They encourage people to write new adventures, and the set time frame of comps can help the writing effort. In addition, entries usually get more attention, and thus authors can be sure to get some feedback and have more potentially players. All this means that competitions are equally important for writers and players alike.For writers of games, there are many big competitions The biggest and most prolific of them all is the IF Comp, which is an annually held competition for short games of all systems. Also aimed at all developing languages is the Spring Thing, a competition where longer games are favoured.
For the Adrift world, the two most important competitions are the Summer Comp, which is aimed at new games, as well as the Game of the Year Competition, which tries to honour the best Adrit game of the year, and for this reasons dumps the else universal rule that entries to competitions must be previously unreleased.
Besides big comps, every year has its own, not always regularly, competitions. They are usually about shorter works, and thus allow people to enter a comp who else wouldn't finish a full game, or to get some early feedback for their work. Commonly used form for such competitions are One Room Comps, which limit the game to one room. Recent Adrift competitions also include the Intro Comp (limited to a game's intro) and Finish The Game Comp (complementation of a full game based on a pre-set location).
The Adriftwiki, DriftOn, has a handy overview page for current and future events.
Getting started
With all this knowledge, you are now perhaps interested a little bit more in Interactive Fiction. A good place to start is by visiting the sites mentioned above, lurking a little bit around the forum and play some of the recommended games. Get a feeling for the flow.If you are also interested in writing, you may download the demo version of Adrift from the main site, and play a little bit around with it. Try out how well it suits you, and compare it to other systems. There's plenty information for beginners on how to write a good game (please consult the appendix), and a whole section of the Adrift forum is dedicated to it. For new authors, it's usually best to start with a short piece of work before trying out more complex and bigger games.
Last but not least, whether you want to write a game or just play them, never forget to enjoy it and have some fun along the way.
Appendix: Additional Useful Links
Adrift Tutorials & Help: direct link to the dedicated section for tutorials and help of the Adrift fourm.Adrift FAQ: direct link to the FAQ on the Adrift forum.
The Interactive Fiction Archive: Hosts as good as everything which is related to Interactive Fiction: Games, Demos, Documents, Interpreters and more.
Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive: A guide to the files on the IF Archive. Usually a good place to look for review of games.
raif and rgif: Two newsgroups for discussions on Interactive Fiction. Using the links, you may read them without having to set up a newsreader.
Inform Designer's Manual: Very informative manual for writers of IF, esp. when using Inform.
IF Pages: A comprehensive list of links to the world of Interactive Fiction.
Roger Firth's IF pages: The website of Roger Firth has many information on IF, mostly Inform stuff. Interesting is the Cloak of Darkness section, which compares different authoring systems.
XYZZYnews: an online magazine for and about Interactive Fiction.
SPAG: The 'Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games', an online magazine for IF games.
IF Reviews: Reviews of games, still in development.