The Inform demonstration games
                    ==============================

  The Inform compiler comes with a selection of demonstration games, in
source code form.  For the most part these haven't been altered in 18
months, but I promised I'd update them (to a more modern style of coding)
last October when the new Designer's Manual came out: finally, here they
are.  A few bugs have also been fixed (except in "Balances", where an
enormous number of bugs have been fixed).

  The example games are...

      Advent.   The first to look at; an Inform translation of the classic
                mainframe adventure by Crowther and Woods, also known as
                "Colossal Cave".

      Toyshop.  A small, not very coherent "game" containing interesting or
                unusual object definitions ("Advent" needs little clever
                coding, being an old-fashioned game, so this fills the
                gap.)

      Balances. A short story of no great interest except that it was
                designed to contain as many nasty parsing puzzles as I
                could think of at the time; writing names on things,
                flexible verb names, numbered lottery tickets, groups
                of tricky plural objects and so on.  Some people like
                it as a game, too.

      Museum of Inform.  This is a brand new "game"; not really a game
                at all, but a museum packed with dozens of exercises
                from the Designer's Manual and other interesting exotic
                objects.  The Museum code may be useful for cutting out
                the good bits and pasting into your own games.

There is also "Adventureland", a port of the primitive Scott Adams classic,
but it's not particularly intended as an example game and I haven't meddled
with it.

  To compile these games in their new forms, you need to have Inform 5.5
together with library 5/12 or later.


  The games are at present to be found at ftp.gmd.de, as source and compiled
code, in the directory incoming/if-archive: after a few days they should end
up in

  if-archive/infocom/compilers/inform/examples.

Source code files end in ".inf" (download in ASCII mode); compiled games
end in ".z5" (download in BINARY).


       Graham Nelson
       December 21st, 1995