Have you played this game?

You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in.

Inform School

by William J. Shlaer

(based on 4 ratings)
No reviews yet - be the first6 members have played this game. It's on 23 wishlists.

About the Story

NOTE: This "game" warns about the possibility (certainty!) of eventually crashing your interpreter. This will happen. It also warns about possibly locking up your entire computer. This is highly unlikely in modern OSes. The warning stands - but your OS will most probably be safe. I asked around about it and got this helpful answer from Zarf:

"I believe the specific issue is if the game tries to write to a memory address outside the Z-machine's allocated range. (Most Inform games manage to avoid this, but Inform School allows the player to set up some crazy code constructions. This is what the author is warning you about.)

A good interpreter will check all game memory accesses, and throw a fatal error if anything is out of bounds. Early interpreters didn't always do this, because of the CPU cost of these constant checks. At this point all interpreters should do it. Even on mobile devices, which are (at this point) as powerful as 1999-era desktop machines, anyhow."

3 Off-Site Reviews

Baf's Guide


Inform School is a "compiler" for Inf, a miniaturized version of Inform that operates within the adventure itself, allowing you to construct simple environments. It's intended to be used as a tool for learning Inform itself. While there are some programming exercises provided, the main idea is to familiarize the player with Inf commands to facilitate later learning Inform.

-- R. Serena Wakefield

Brass Lantern
It is not only trying to teach you a language but also how to use that language to write a text adventure. In doing so, its reach has exceeded its grasp. Inform School is an amazing example of what can be done with the z-machine, but the inherent limits of the z-machine and some poor pedagogical choices limit Inform School's effectiveness as an aid to learning Inform.
See the full review

SPAG
In short, if you want to learn Inform, but are having trouble, give this program a try. It isn't perfect, but it will give you a nice place to practice without having to constantly compile story files. You can create objects and change them on the fly and see how they will behave. It's really worth it for any potential student of Inform and could save a lot of aggravation when you're ready to write a real game.
See the full review

Tags

- View the most common tags (What's a tag?)

(Log in to add your own tags)
Edit Tags
Search all tags on IFDB | View all tags on IFDB

Tags you added are shown below with checkmarks. To remove one of your tags, simply un-check it.

Enter new tags here (use commas to separate tags):

Delete Tags

Game Details

Inform School on IFDB

Recommended Lists

Inform School appears in the following Recommended Lists:

IF to learn with by Emily Short
A few IF games are designed to be educational (and not only for children). This is a brief overview of the ones I've found most successful.

New walkthroughs for August 2023 by David Welbourn
On Tuesday, August 29, 2023, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works...

Polls

The following polls include votes for Inform School:

Educational IF by Spike
Several of us are interested in using IF for education, both in the classroom as well as more broadly. The purpose of this poll is to collect examples of IF with an educational focus.

RSS Feeds

New member reviews
Updates to external links
All updates to this page


This is version 5 of this page, edited by David Welbourn on 29 August 2023 at 6:24pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page