Inform 7 Home Page / Documentation
Chapter 25: Releasing
§25.1. The finished product; §25.2. Bibliographic data; §25.3. Genres; §25.4. The Library Card; §25.5. The Treaty of Babel and the IFID; §25.6. The Release button and the Materials folder; §25.7. The Joy of Feelies; §25.8. Cover art; §25.9. An introductory booklet and postcard; §25.10. A website; §25.11. A playable web page; §25.12. Using Inform with Vorple; §25.13. Website templates; §25.14. Advanced website templates; §25.15. Republishing existing works of IF; §25.16. Walkthrough solutions; §25.17. Releasing the source text; §25.18. Improving the index map; §25.19. Producing an EPS format map; §25.20. Settings in the map-maker; §25.21. Table of map-maker settings; §25.22. Kinds of value accepted by the map-maker; §25.23. Titling and abbreviation; §25.24. Rubrics
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Contents of Writing with Inform |
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Chapter 24: Testing and Debugging |
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Chapter 26: Publishing |
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Indexes of the examples |
§25.1. The finished product
This chapter and the next are about what to do when we have a complete, finished work on our hands.
For almost all of the time when a new work of IF is being written, it lives inside the familiar two-panel spread of the Inform user interface. But that isn't how eventual players will experience it. They will want to play a "story file" in a standard format, and they will do so with a wide range of different interpreters on many different computers or websites, including some -- like mobile phones -- on which Inform itself will not run.
So how does a new work of IF reach players? The simple answer, covered in this chapter, is that clicking the Release button instead of Go causes Inform to output a stand-alone story file. But as we will see, Release can do much more than that: it can attach covers, include bibliographic data, make websites and much more. Releasing is the process of making all of the material we want to deliver to our eventual players.
But that is only the first step. What do we do with the material when we have it? Printing out a manuscript of a novel is not the same as publishing it. So the next chapter, on Publishing, completes the story.
