Andy Chase

I finally got around to fixing a critical bug in Dastardly, my first interactive fiction adventure written in Inform.

As it turned out, all it took was the addition of two characters, trapping the PutOn verb instead of the Put verb.

It only took me about 10 minutes to track the problem down when I used Inform's built-in debugging tools: actions, messages, and changes. Why didn't I use those when I was first developing the game? Because I didn't read that section of the Inform Designer's Manual, and I didn't really know about the debugging tools until I was paging through the DM4 before bed a couple of days ago.

In fairness to myself, it wasn't a bug that came to my attention until well after the game was originally released for the Hours of Inform minicomp... that's what you get for releasing a game with absolutely zero third-party testing.

Also, I didn't mention this when it first came out because of that bug, but Dastardly was reviewed in SPAG #42:

http://sparkynet.com/spag/backissues/SPAG42

Tagged:

• inform
• interactivefiction
• zork
• rtfm