Build Your First Text Adventure

1. What you are building

A parser game is a world the player interacts with by typing commands. The Creator lets you describe that world through structured tools, while Inform provides the compiler underneath.

The core building blocks are:

• Rooms — locations.
• Directions and connections — how rooms connect.
• Objects — things in the world.
• Characters — people or creatures the player can encounter.
• Actions/verbs — things the player can type.
• Variables and logic — remembered state and rules.
• Puzzles, quests and events — higher-level story structure.

2. Create a parser project

Use Ctrl+N or choose New parser or gamebook project.

In Story Type choose Parser interactive fiction - players type commands.

The dialog also asks for project name, optional author name and project folder.

3. Understand the Creator

Once a parser project is open, the main interface centres on the Project Explorer. It is a tree of the Creator's understanding of your game: rooms, objects, characters and other generated sections.

The Inform source editor is normally hidden. Use View → View Inform source when you want it.

Ctrl+Shift+E returns focus to the Project Explorer.

F5 refreshes the explorer from the current project source.

4. Rooms

A room is a location in the story world. It can be a kitchen, field, spaceship bridge, cupboard, dream, abstract void, or wherever else the player can meaningfully occupy.

Use Add → Room or Ctrl+Shift+R.

A useful room needs:

• A clear name.
• A description which tells the player what is interesting.
• Connections to other rooms, unless being trapped there is intentional.

Kitchen

A cramped kitchen smelling faintly of burnt toast. A door leads east.
A brass key sits on the windowsill.

5. Room connections and directions

Use Add → Room connection or Ctrl+Shift+C.

A room connection says that one room lies in a direction from another.

Garden is east of Kitchen.

Inform automatically understands the corresponding reverse direction in ordinary cases: if Garden is east of Kitchen, Kitchen is west of Garden.

Standard directions include north, south, east, west, northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest, up, down, inside and outside.

6. Custom directions

Use Add → Direction pair when your world needs something beyond the normal compass.

A direction pair lets you define a new direction and its opposite. Examples might include:

fore -> aft
port -> starboard
clockwise -> anticlockwise

Use custom directions when they genuinely describe movement in your setting. Do not invent fourteen synonyms for north unless your players have personally offended you.

7. Objects

Use Add → Object or Ctrl+Shift+O.

The Creator supports common object kinds and properties including ordinary portable objects, containers, wearable things, food, devices, keys and backdrops.

An object normally has a name, location and description.

Brass key
Location: Kitchen
Description: A small brass key with the word SHED scratched into it.

Place objects where the player can discover them. If an object is vital, make sure the game gives enough clues to find it.

8. Doors and regions

Doors connect locations and can support door-like behaviour such as opening, closing and locking. Use Ctrl+Shift+D.

Regions group rooms into larger areas. Use Ctrl+Shift+G.

A region can make a large world easier to organise: House, Village, Castle, Dream Sequence, Gary's Regrettable Property Portfolio, and so on.

9. Characters and conversation

Use Add → Character or Ctrl+Shift+P.

A character is an actor in the world rather than merely scenery.

Use Add → Conversation topic or Ctrl+Shift+T to add responses around subjects the player may discuss.

Character: Gary
Location: Garden

Topic: shed
Response: "Don't go in there," Gary says immediately, which is not suspicious at all.

10. Verbs and actions

Use Add → Verb / action or Ctrl+Shift+A.

Inform already knows many verbs: take, drop, open, close, wear, eat, examine, push, pull, ask, tell and many more.

Create a custom action when the player should be able to type something specific to your story.

slap Gary

A custom action can print a response and participate in story logic, including win/loss conditions.

11. Puzzles

Use Add → Puzzle or Ctrl+Shift+U.

A puzzle is a structured goal or obstacle. Start with simple cause-and-effect:

1. Player needs to enter shed.
2. Shed is locked.
3. Key is in kitchen.
4. Player takes key.
5. Player unlocks shed.
6. Player enters shed.

Good puzzles tell the player what the obstacle is, provide clues toward the solution, and react sensibly to near misses.

12. Variables

Use Add → Variable or Ctrl+Shift+V.

A variable stores information which can change while the story runs.

patience = 10
gary_annoyed = false
coins = 3

Variables are useful for health, money, scores, flags, counters, relationship values and anything else the story needs to remember.

13. Story logic, events and quests

Story logic connects conditions to consequences. Use Ctrl+Shift+L.

Manage story events opens with Ctrl+E.

Quest uses Ctrl+Shift+Q.

These tools are for larger structures such as:

• Something happening after a condition becomes true.
• A sequence of tasks.
• Tracking whether a major story event has occurred.
• Changing the world after a puzzle is solved.

You do not need all of them in a tiny first game. Start with rooms, objects and one puzzle; add machinery only when the story actually needs machinery.

14. Win and loss conditions

A parser game needs a way to finish. AccessiIf's Creator can use story conditions and custom actions as win/loss triggers.

Examples:

• Win when the player enters the Shed while carrying the Parcel.
• Win after performing a custom action successfully.
• Lose when Health falls to zero.
• Lose when the player triggers a disastrous event.

Test endings directly. Do not assume a condition fires merely because it looks convincing in the wizard.

15. Story Wizard and authoring modes

Add → Story wizard or Ctrl+Shift+W provides a guided route through common story setup.

The Project menu also contains Authoring mode and Teach me what to add next. Authoring modes change which tools are emphasised; they do not prevent ordinary Inform source from being available.

16. Project Explorer and context menus

The Project Explorer is your main navigation view.

Select an item and activate it to move to its corresponding generated source when source view is shown.

Use the Applications key or Shift+F10 on tree items for actions such as editing, renaming or deleting where supported.

Ctrl+Shift+N performs a conservative rename of the selected project item.

Ctrl+Shift+F searches the whole project.

Ctrl+M opens the source-derived world map/explorer.

17. Generated Inform source

Use View → View Inform source to show or hide the Inform source editor.

The wizards ultimately generate Inform source. Looking at it can help when:

• An Inform compiler error mentions a particular line.
• You want to learn what the Creator generated.
• You need something more advanced than the current wizard supports.

Be cautious when manually editing Creator-generated sections. The Creator deliberately avoids automatically deleting or rewriting source it does not recognise as its own generated section.

18. Build, play and output format

• F8 — Build game.
• F9 — Preview or play.
• Build → Output format — choose the supported target format.

For many traditional games, Z-machine is a good target. Glulx is useful when the project needs a larger, more modern VM or features beyond classic Z-machine limits.

An Inform toolchain must be available for building.

19. Story Health

Use Ctrl+F8 or Build → Check Story Health.

Story Health is a preflight check. It is not the same thing as the Inform compiler. It looks for Creator-level structural problems and helps catch obvious mistakes before compilation.

Always run both Story Health and an actual build before release.

20. Development Studio and Release Centre

Ctrl+F10 opens the Development Studio, which contains development-oriented tools such as build history, snapshots and saved test scripts.

Ctrl+F11 opens the Release Centre, which stores release metadata and readiness information.

These are especially useful once the game grows beyond “three rooms and Gary”.

21. Parser Creator keystrokes

22. Worked game: Gary and the Shed

Kitchen
A cramped kitchen. A brass key rests on the windowsill. The garden is east.

Garden
A damp little garden. Gary stands beside a locked shed to the north. The kitchen is west.

Topic: shed
"Absolutely nothing interesting is in the shed," Gary says much too quickly.

23. Understanding Inform errors

Inform compiler messages often quote the exact generated sentence it could not understand.

If it says two sentences appear to have run together, inspect punctuation around quoted room or object descriptions.

If it complains that it cannot find a verb in "", look for an empty generated text/sentence.

If it names a source line, use source view to inspect that area. The Creator's structured tools should be your first place to correct Creator-generated content; manual source editing is the fallback for advanced cases.

24. Design advice

• Make the important nouns visible in descriptions.
• Give custom actions useful failure responses.
• Do not make every object portable just because the wizard can.
• Test room directions from both sides.
• Test puzzles in the “wrong” order as well as the intended order.
• Keep a small test game around when experimenting with new Creator features.
• Build after every meaningful addition. Compiler errors are friendlier in groups of one.

25. Troubleshooting

The player cannot go through a connection

Check the direction and room names, then inspect the generated source. If the project was created in an older prerelease build, recreate or migrate the affected connection rather than assuming the new wizard understood old data perfectly.

I cannot delete something

The Creator only automatically deletes content inside sections it recognises as Creator-generated. If an item came from hand-written or older source, View Inform Source may be required.

Build says the toolchain is missing

The bundled/release installation must contain a working Inform toolchain. In a development setup, verify the configured toolchain manifest and executable locations.

Inform compiles but the game behaves wrongly

Compilation proves the source is legal Inform, not that the story logic is correct. Playtest the actual action and inspect Story Health.

26. Parser-game glossary

Room

A location the player can occupy.

Object

A thing represented in the world model.

Door

A special object connecting locations.

Region

A group of rooms.

Action

A type of thing the player can do.

Verb

A word or phrase which invokes an action.

Variable

A stored value used by story logic.

Condition

A test which decides whether something should happen.

Inform

The authoring/compiler system used underneath AccessiIf's parser Creator.

Z-machine

A target virtual machine for parser games.

Glulx

A larger modern target virtual machine for parser games.

Story Health

AccessiIf's structural preflight checking, separate from compilation.