If you're setting a game during the Cuban Missile Crisis, look through a library. find out what people were wearing, what other issues were in the news, how houses were furnished, what cars were being driven. Especially include things which now seem foreign.
This means keeping many trails open at once, inevitably requiring a fairly 'parallel' plot. This plot should be discovered rather than announced, so show, don't tell.
For a fortnight nobody at all emailed me, or posted a follow-up. Doesn't anyone care, I thought? It turned out my newsreader was broken, and hadn't posted at all.
I don't really believe in 'directions' in art; the rope twists as you follow it, that's all.
What I would pay much more attention to are the few points where the player can inadvertently make a career decision. Most players end up back-tracking, though some actually enjoy this.
Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that.
The time has mainly gone on getting Inform into a decent shape for public use. I suppose the plot of 'Curses' makes a sequel conceivable when compared with, say, the plot of 'Hamlet' but none is planned.
The most frequent complaint is that it's hard. True. it's a hard game to win Also, many people ask me how to use the secret debugging commands, apparently under the impression that I'll tell them.
The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.
Players very widely disagree with me about what's hard and what's easy. and in a way, 'I won, but it was a fight' is the best compliment a game can receive.
At the end of April I archived 'Curses' and Inform, and announced them on the newsgroups.
I'm rather pleased with the new manuals. I see Inform now as a gauche young adult, having got past the stage of growing out of his shoes every few months.
I try to make puzzles range all the way from easy to hard, and to leave many open at once.
I like to employ a form of repetition, in which the same elements recur but in different and unexpected ways. rather than being discarded as soon as they are understood or passed over.
Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.
