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Graham Nelson Quotes

Graham Nelson Quotes & Quotations
Name:
Graham Nelson
Type:
Mathematician
Nationality:
English
Birth year:

  • 1
    A deliberate choice on my part was for the player to continue to find new possibilities in the early Attic rooms far into the game. I think this builds atmosphere, though it means there's no neat division of the prologue from the middle game. Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson
  • 2
    At the end of April I archived 'Curses' and Inform, and announced them on the newsgroups. Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson
  • 3
    Eventually I found it had been working all along-but didn't show anything on screen until it had the first full page of text. I inserted 30 new lines, and suddenly my toy said 'hEllO woRlD'. An hour later I understood alphabet shifting rather better! Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson
  • 4
    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. Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson
  • 5
    I don't really believe in 'directions' in art; the rope twists as you follow it, that's all. Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson
  • 6
    I have been working on a more serious game, called 'Jigsaw', for about 18 months, but don't hold your breath. it'll be a while arriving. Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson
  • 7
    I try to make puzzles range all the way from easy to hard, and to leave many open at once. Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson
  • 8
    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. Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson
  • 9
    If pushed, though, I'd say that the next stage will be reached when it it's no longer true that about 75% of the best games were written in 1980's on the way to that. Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson
  • 10
    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. Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson
  • 11
    Once the announcements were actually heard, there was a slow but gathering response. by the end of the first year, an avalanche. Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson
  • 12
    Remember that 'Curses', being free, is circulated much more widely than shareware games, so it gets more than its fair share of attention. Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson
  • 13
    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. Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson
  • 14
    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. Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson
  • 15
    The single biggest is to stop the player from getting stuck and getting bored; always think like the player as well as the designer. Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson
  • 16
    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. Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson
  • 17
    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. Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson
  • 18
    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. Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson
  • 19
    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. Graham-NelsonGraham Nelson