The Source

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736 page PDF

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Blue Lacuna is written in Inform 7 by Graham Nelson. Both the game and the source are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

The complete Inform 7 source text for Blue Lacuna runs to some 365,000 words (not counting comments or the Standard Rules), about five megabytes of uncompressed text. It has now been released under a Creative Commons license. You can browse, download, or even compile it yourself.

My goal in distributing the source is not to model well-written Inform code, which it certainly is not. Rather, I hope it will be of use and interest both as a record of the story's creation and a window into the pathways and choices not taken in your own traversal.

Use the links to the left to access the source in whatever format you like, but be warned: if you haven't finished the story yet, you will be hard-pressed to avoid major spoilers at every turn.

Blue Lacuna was written in Inform 7, a wonderful natural-language based approach to crafting interactive fiction. The story was constructed through writing sentences like:

Rume's Warning begins when the canvas is mostly finished.

If you'd like to learn how to write your own interactive stories, my book Creating Interactive Fiction With Inform 7 takes you through the construction of a full story from start to finish. It's written for people without any previous programming experience, and I think it's a great introduction to authoring interactive narratives.