1.3. Disenchantment Bay

| Chapter 1: How to Use The Recipe Book |

| 1.3. Disenchantment Bay

"Disenchantment Bay" is a simple work of IF used as a running example in Chapter 3 of Writing with Inform - not so much a tutorial as a convenient hook on which to hang some demonstrations of the basics. Because the resulting examples only use basic features and in the most straightforward way, they make for uninteresting "recipes" - so they are not included in the Recipe Book proper. But some readers might like to have all twelve stages of the example gathered on a single page: this is that page.

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| Example Disenchantment Bay 1 A running example in this chapter, Disenchantment Bay, involves chartering a boat. This is the first step: creating the cabin. |
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To begin with the title: "Disenchantment Bay" There are many Disenchantment Bays across the world, named by eighteenth-century ships' captains - one in Antarctica, another in Tasmania, for instance. The most famous is probably the one where Lewis and Clark's expedition broke through to the Pacific. But ours is the one in Alaska, named in 1791 by a Spanish navigator who had hoped it might lead to the fabled Northwest Passage, and all of this history is beside the point since the game is set in the present day. The Cabin is a room. "The front of the small cabin is entirely occupied with navigational instruments, a radar display, and radios for calling back to shore. Along each side runs a bench with faded blue vinyl cushions, which can be lifted to reveal the storage space underneath. A glass case against the wall contains several fishing rods. Scratched windows offer a view of the surrounding bay, and there is a door south to the deck. A sign taped to one wall announces the menu of tours offered by the Yakutat Charter Boat Company." We might want to start with the glass case. The Cabin contains a glass case. In the glass case is a collection of fishing rods. Now Inform will have guessed that the case is a container, but its default idea of a container is something like a bucket: permanently open and not able to be opened and shut. We can change that: The case is closed, transparent, and openable. We get a similar set of guesses if we write The bench is in the cabin. On the bench are some blue vinyl cushions. Using "some" rather than "a" or "the" tells Inform that the cushions are to be referred to as a plural object in the future. And because of the "on the bench..." phrase, Inform will guess that the bench is a supporter and that it is fixed in place and cannot be moved from room to room. We do have to tell it that the bench can be sat on, though: The bench is enterable. And now a short script, so that if we type TEST ME, we experiment with the case and bench: Test me with "examine case / get rods / open case / get rods / sit on bench / take cushions / get up"

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| Example Disenchantment Bay 2 Disenchantment Bay: creating some of the objects in the cabin's description. |
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| Example Disenchantment Bay 3 Disenchantment Bay: adding a view of the glacier. |
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| Example Disenchantment Bay 4 Disenchantment Bay: fleshing out the descriptions of things on the boat. |
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| Example Disenchantment Bay 5 Disenchantment Bay: adding the door and the deck to our charter boat. |
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| Example Disenchantment Bay 6 Disenchantment Bay: locking up the charter boat's fishing rods. |
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| Example Disenchantment Bay 7 Disenchantment Bay: making the radar and instruments switch on and off. |
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| Example Disenchantment Bay 8 Disenchantment Bay: a pushable chest of ice for the boat. |
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| Example Disenchantment Bay 9 Disenchantment Bay: enter the charter boat's Captain. |
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| Example Disenchantment Bay 10 Disenchantment Bay: things for the player and the characters to wear and carry. |
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| Example Disenchantment Bay 11 Disenchantment Bay: making a holdall of the backpack. |
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| Example Disenchantment Bay 12 A final trip to Disenchantment Bay: the scenario turned into a somewhat fuller scene, with various features that have not yet been explained. |
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