Chapter 13: Testing and Publishing
§13.1. Testing; §13.2. Publishing
![]() | Contents of The Inform Recipe Book |
![]() | Chapter 12: Typography, Layout, and Multimedia Effects |
![]() | Indexes of the examples |
§13.1. Testing
There are no recipes for testing, alas, although most experienced IF authors have their preferred ways of going about it. Briefly: the best advice is to build and maintain a Skein which holds complete play-throughs of the piece, so that it is easy to check with a single click that all is still well; to have beta-testers who play through (substantial) drafts and send back their transcripts of play, along with suggestions; and to listen to these suggestions, and treat the beta-testers as editors rather than galley slaves.
Alpha shows a way to gracefully accept beta-testers' annotations without advancing time in the story.
Most large works of IF have historically provided secret commands for testing and debugging - commands removed (or sometimes accidentally not) in the final released product. Inform does this automatically: the commands SHOWME, ACTIONS and SCENES are always present except in a released story file. It also allows us to write passages of source text which apply only for the testing phase, so that we can define new testing commands, or other checks that all is well: Bic demonstrates this, and is also useful in its own right.
![]() | Start of Chapter 13: Testing and Publishing |
![]() | Back to Chapter 12: Typography, Layout, and Multimedia Effects: §12.5. Glulx Multimedia Effects |
![]() | Onward to §13.2. Publishing |
It may occasionally be useful to check whether all objects in our game have a given property. Here we have a "not for release" section that will run at the start of the game and alert us to any objects lacking description:
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It may occasionally be useful to check whether all objects in our game have a given property. Here we have a "not for release" section that will run at the start of the game and alert us to any objects lacking description:
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