pat10/beat-witch

Beat Witch

An Interactive Loneliness By Robert Patten

This is the source code for Beat Witch, a horror text adventure (interactive fiction) that involves a mysterious plague, music that can kill you, and the undead. It was an entry in IFComp 2023.

It is being released primarily to help other Inform authors, though it's not supposed to be a shining example of great code. It's quite hacky in some parts.

A big issue I ran into was that when I was coding the game was that the online interpreters (Parchment/Quixe and by extension Lectrote) did not support sound. (They may by the time you read this.) I used Vorple to get around the issue, and other Inform coders may be curious at how I got sound to work in traditional interpreters and the browser at the same time. See the code under the Book Music heading in the story.ni file.

However, as of this date, Brian Rushton's Bisquixe is probably the better option for adding sounds for online play. (Reasons: Vorple has scrolling issues, in 2023 wouldn't produce IFComp's player transcripts, and Bisquixe is closer to standard interpreter behavior, as far as I understand.) Bisquixe was not available when I created Beat Witch. I really should move everything over to it, but Vorple is tightly coupled with this code, so it will take some effort to do so.

Players who want to find out more about the beat witch world or the author's deranged thought processes may also find the source code interesting. If you haven't played through Beat Witch at least once, come back after you have done so.

The main source code file is Beat Witch.inform/Source/story.ni. It was compiled with Inform 7 version 9.3 (6M62).

You can find the latest playable version of the game (online or download) here.

Legal stuff

You are free to use selections of this code and adapt them for personal or commercial projects. But I am not releasing the characters, world, story, etc., for public use here -- just the code.

I have also included music. This is for people intending to experiment and compile the story on their own. You are also welcome to download it for your personal use only. See the credits in the help menu for more information on the music, as well as the sound effects (which I did not produce).

Extensions I used are included as well. While these are all publicly available, please respect the rights of the respective authors.

--Robert Patten

A Basement in Idaho

April 1, 2024