Inform 7 scaffolding

This repository provides wrapper scripts and a wrapper Makefile around the Inform 7 system and the Glulxe interpreter.

You only truly need two files to create an Inform 7 project: A .ni file which contains the story, and a text file containing an UUID (presumably as a way for each Inform 7 game in existence to have a unique ID - this gets embedded into the final binary).

The wrapping in this repository ensure that you can focus on your .ni story file without having to consider all the other files that the Inform 7 machinery likes to create, which the scripts instead put into a subdirectory named scaffolding.

You can use this project with niv by running niv init and then niv add nqpz/inform7-scaffolding. (This project is currently not available as a Nix flake, but probably should be.) Example use: https://github.com/nqpz/kantinen2012.

Creating a new project

First install Nix.

Run make init with no arguments to create a new project. This will create these files:

• story.ni: An empty file.
• uuid.txt: A single-line file containing an UUID.
• Makefile: A Makefile that you can use for development and release.

In addition, you can choose to create a root directory named includes consisting of .i7x Inform 7 extension files. These can be imported like so:

Include <name> by project.

You can put this in your .gitignore:

scaffolding
bin
result

Building and running

Run nix-shell to enter an environment with Inform 7 tooling present. This is useful for when developing the game.

Then run make test to build and run the test build. All builds use the Glulx format. The test build has additional helper commands such as SHOWME.)

You can also:

• Run make bin/test.ulx to build a test build. (Contrary to make test, this doesn't immediately run it.)

• Run make bin/release.ulx to build a release build.

• Run glulxe bin/release.ulx to run the release build.

• Run nix-build to build a release build. This will build release.ulx and make it available in result/. This is useful if you only need to build the game, and not actively develop it.

• Run make map to open Inform's generated world HTML page, showing, among other things, a map of your created world. (All this target does is call xdg-open to open scaffolding/Index/World.html.) You must have first built either a test build or a release build.

(Alternatively, if you can't install Nix, you can follow the Inform 7 manual on how to use its GUIs and manually import story.ni into the story window, and then build and run from there.)

External resources

• Emacs package on MELPA

Note: There is also an Inform 7 package in nixpkgs, but this is outdated and uses a 2015 version of Inform 7 along with a wrapper script.

License

Copyright (C) 2025 by Niels G. W. Serup.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.