Design notes

My vision for this game was to see if the Warhammer 40.000 tagline, "In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war", would compile in the Inform 7 language for writing text adventures.

Inform 7 is a natural language design system for interactive fiction (http://inform7.com/), which allows you to describe relationships between rooms and objects and have the system generate the corresponding game.

Sadly, it turns out that Inform 7 handles "in the x is y" by generating a container called x containing a y. Since there is nowhere for the container to be, the game would not compile.

To make the game compile, I had to make Inform 7 understand that "In the grim darkness of the far future" should be a room and not an object. I could do this by explicitly declaring it as a room, but that would ruin the poetry of the natural language descriptions.

Luckily, "matt w" on the interactive fiction forums had a better idea: The phrase "Darkness is inside of The Warp" sets up a spatial relationship between "Darkness" and "The Warp", causing Inform to create rooms with those names. "Darkness" is further interpreted as a shorthand for the full name, such that "In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war", now creates a room called "In the grim darkness of the far future there" containing "only war".

I am still hoping to find an even more elegant solution in the future, but this will do for now.