Issue #8: Retro graphical adventures in the browser

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Hey all! I hope everyone is doing ok! We just had a brutal heat wave and a whole city burning to flames and record wildfires and there will be more in the coming years thanks to global warming but uuuuh all good apart from that I suppose... 😅

My news
I undertook a little project related to Z-Machine abbreviations this month (it feels like I mention them every other month doesn't it?...). The Inform 6 compiler had a way to apply abbrevations in the text that wasn't optimal, and could miss the best way to apply them when two of them overlapped. So I changed it! It's my very first time contributing to the Inform 6 compiler, but it really wasn't too bad. As a result, from now on (when Inform 6.36 comes out, or whenever you decide to compile the compiler from source), everyone will have slightly smaller story files - I saved 1200 bytes in Tristam Island thanks to this, and Stefan Vogt saved 1100 in his Hibernated 1: Director's Cut! It feels very good to contribute to the community 😀

Community news
Among the notable things that happened last month in the field of retro text adventures:

Stefan Vogt published the "Puddle build tools", a toolchain that makes disk images out of your Z-Machine (z3 or z5) game! I helped with setting up a couple of the platforms, like the CoCo or the TI-99/4A, and served as a Guinea pig for the rest of them. Congratulations to him; you have no idea how hard he worked to find all these interpreters, choose the best ones, parametrize them, find the right tools to build an automated toolchain out of them, etc. Now you can publish your game on over two dozen platforms! And I'm happy he added the Dragon 64 and the Sam Coupé - that's going to be for Release 3 of Tristam Island...
There are 18 new text adventure games available to play at ParserComp! Head over to itch.io to discover the entries and rate them! I haven't had time yet, but they sound very diverse and exciting!
A cool summer project: a few people seem interested in digging more on the file format for Level 9 games, which currently doesn't have a neat specification or standard like the Z-Machine does. It could prove useful and might make people interested in writing more interpreters or games for that format! If that's your cup of tea, head over to this intfiction.org thread.
And only slightly related to retro text adventures, but the Mammoth Cave (yes, *that* cave) seemed to have some very interesting weather conditions last month! Pretty cool 😀

Article of the month
Switching tracks again, this month's article is a technical one! This article will give you a way to write browser-based graphical adventures using Inform 6. It uses a neat extension, Vorple, that not enough people know about; if you manage to set everything up, you can make a game that plays in the browser and can also be ported to Windows, OSX and Linux! I hope you enjoy it :)

Read the article

Oh, before we go, one last thing...
This was Issue #8 of ">REMEMBER", and this month I'd like to ask for your feedback! If you have 2 minutes to reply to these quick questions about the newsletter, it'd really help me understand what you like about it so I can make it better. Thank you in advance, and take care; I'll see you next month!