| Chapter 20: Publishing |

| 20.8. The Release button

Inform's Release button constructs a version of the current project which can be played by anyone with an "interpreter" - they do not need the Inform application installed on their computers, and they will not be able to see the source text. Released versions differ slightly from the versions playable in the Game panel of Inform, because debugging commands such as ACTIONS are not included with them. As we've seen, also excluded is any material in the source text under a heading including the words "not for release".

The Settings panel of each project contains a tick-box called "Create a Blorb archive for release", and by default this is ticked. "Blorb" is a nonsense word from a popular early 1980s work of IF called "Enchanter", where it was the name of a spell whose purpose was to "safely protect a small object as though in a strong box". In the late 1990s, the name was borrowed for a standard format for what might be called the wrapping and packaging of IF. A typical Blorb archive produced by Inform contains the "story file" - the actual program for the game - together with its library card and cover art (if any: see later on).

Modern IF interpreters such as Zoom for Mac OS X and Unix, and Windows Frotz, can play blorb archives directly, and the authors of Inform hope to make this the normal practice in future. Still, some interpreters cannot read blorbs directly and have to be given the actual story file: so by unchecking the above tick-box, we can insist that Inform creates only that. The disadvantage with this, of course, is that the library card (with all its bibliographic data) and any cover art is lost in the process.

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