Nice job, Jeff! I look forward to seeing more articles of this sort. :razz:

I have been thinking about writing a tutorial for Hugo for some time now. I figured today was as good a day to get started as any, so here is a basic idea (very unfinished!) of what I have:

http://www.globaltester.com/stuff/crafting.html

Again, this is just to see if it makes sense. I want to do a bit more. I was thinking of using HugoZork.hug as an example, since a lot of people can relate to Zork, at least from a name recognition standpoint. What I would really like to do is recreate Zork II and III in Hugo as well.

I also want to take examples from games I have seen, like Guilty Bastards, Crimson Spring, Necrotic Drift, Fallacy of Dawn, etc and abstract some of the code (for those games where source is available). Even a game like SexBot, which has some nifty features in it. Then people can learn specific tidbits that are interesting to implement. Plus it might lead the way towards making more extensions available for Hugo.

- Jeff

I did not know this. However, the terrorism stuff would, probably, only be an issue for approximately the last two turns of the game; and besides, it's just an excersie anyway. Still, Iwill look for this game of which you speak.

Terrorist stuff kind of already was done in the Inform game, "The Best Man."

Hmm. okay--well, here's a good start, which coincidentally is about all I have currently planned for the game I was going to make anyway. (there is more, which makes it into the bigger game I was planning, but I can close it out at one point and make it a complete arc.)

A man--our player, in fact!--goes through the airport, commenting snidely to himself on all of the basic hopocracy and ridiculousness which can be found in airports. (this is a normal, realistic airport, not a Douglas Adams-style airport.) After all of the hastles of checking in and whatnot, he gets on the plane. Give the player a few turns to look around at all the various crap on the plane, and then he gets blown up in a terrorist attack. Hi-ho.

Not many rutines, most of it would be just object description, and there is still plenty of room for detail--I can expand on a *lot*, to make it "better" as I go along!

[quote="Joel Robinson"]Whaddia think, sirs?[/quote]

Lysander!

My advice is to go grab Sample.hug, Hugozork.hug, Scourge.hug, the Guilty Bastards source file set and have at thee.

(Now that I think about it, the Sample.hug thing is probably Shell.hug. Well, either way. Let me know if you can't find it.)

Keep your first game as small as possible. It's too late to enter the Comp, but maybe there will be a Spring Competition or something. Who can tell!? I don't know! ^__^ But still -- your first game is going to be garbage, but that's OK. If you get one person to chuckle or think, "Hmm, potential!" then you're off to a better start than most of us.

It'd be great to make your first ware this giant murder mystery or zombie-robot murder simulator or whatever else, but just try to stick to the basics. Try a quick cave crawl, get two fresh ideas that nobody has thought of before, and try to crank it out. Accomplishing something is the best incentive to do it in the future. (No way would ND have been finished if I didn't have five years worth of reviews to read from and get encouraged / inspired by, for instance).

So think of something quick and easy and dirty. From there, yeah, I can help you with Hugo. There may be tons and tonnes of people writing in TADS and Inform, but you have access to the two people who have written more Hugo than anyone else on the planet here, one of which is the actual language creator. That's a huge benefit.

You can ask any Hugo questions here or on AIM when I'm on. We can even walk through the first thing you put together right on here.

The more work you do before writing any code, the less you have to do afterwards (OK, not always true, but true in this case.) What kind of thing would you like to make? What is your goal? [i]What are your intentions in taking out the Hugo Language? [/i]

We could even go through Ruins if you wanted to see how it was done in Hugo.

The lack of new-programmer-friendliness of the Hugo manual is something I'm pretty regretful about. I had intended to do exactly that: to take the reader through the development of an actual game, but I just didn't have the time to dedicate to adding it in, focusing instead on just getting the existing book cleaned up enough. It's something to think about for the future, though.

I'd know that I'd have a much easier time comprehending the Hugo Manual if it incorporated the ongoing development of a game (such as Ruins, or hell, why not go for the gusto and use Guilty Bastards?) Claims to the contrary, it is NOT friendly to people completely new to programming. After chapter 3 or so, it rapidly becomes even less friendly, and more cryptic, and (I think) more assumptions about reader knowledge start creeping in. I'm sure it's great for people with prior programming experience, for reference rather than 'how to program 101'.

I'm convinced this lack of (newbie) documentation is the reason for the SINFUL underutilization of the Hugo Design System (tm). I'm trying to help, but I'm having to learn it as well, so that doesn't put me in a good position to teach others or write tutorials, although I'm attempting to with the Hugonomicon.

I think we should force Robb and/or Kent to start online Hugo classes. ;)

Well, there's no denying that the Inform Manual is pretty much a perfect specimen when it comes to coding manuals; some people would recommend reading it just to get some of the non-Inform info and coding basics that it offers.

On the other hand, Hugo does have some well-commented source code to games that pretty much are "Ruins," just not incorporated into the book. "The Vault of Hugo" was specifically written for the task, and I've heard many a great thing about the "Scavenger Hunt" source code, although I haven't looked at it closely.

[color=cyan][b][i][u]Posted edited by JONSEY-VISION! Let's clean this shit up. [/b][/i][/u][/color]


So, as any readers of my [URL=http://www.livejournal.com/users/jamesbond_039]livejournal[/url] -- which I am mentioning here because I inted to whore, and I must stress, WHORE it out anywhere that will not ban me for doing so (thx rob brb! ^_^) -- I am intent upon making my own IF game.

One thing I notice, comparing the Hugo manual to the Inform manual, is that it paridoxically seems much more "beginner friendly." The [i]Ruins[/i] sample game that the manual guides the player through creating is one such example. I know that adding something like this could increase the size of this already manifold Hugo manual exponentially, but I think it would be very much worth it.

Do you think that this could be possible? Maybe as a seperate document, or even program?