Introduction

What is “interactive fiction”?

Now that we’re on github, there a chance (however tiny) that someone found this by browsing github repositories. If you’re not familiar with interactive fiction, the often-parser-based text games that saw their commercial heyday back in the 1980s, you might want to read the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation IF FAQ.

Still deciding what interactive fiction language is right for you?

If you are checking out interactive fiction languages to see what appeals most to you, look at some example game code and decide how intuitive it feels. You can peruse some game sources here on this site and at the IF Archive.

You can look at code samples for several IF systems over at the IF Wiki. If you’re curious how Hugo compares to general coding languages, this page goes into that to some degree.

What is the point of this site?

There’s no better way to learn Hugo than to read the Hugo Book, but Hugo By Example aspires to cover Hugo concepts in further detail, hopefully providing answers when authors don’t completely understand anything and need a bit of a guiding hand. Additionally, some pages are great for quick reference guides that any well-versed Hugo author will want to keep handy.

What is the future of Hugo?

Hugo’s author, Kent Tessman, has spent the years since its creation writing and honing a screenwriting app called Fade In (it’s very good). The maintenance of Hugo’s compilers and interpreters has largely fallen on others’ shoulders. The Hugo community has been graced with nice updates and improvements just within the last few years alone, and there is no telling what else the future holds. Maybe you want to help write it?