Basic Help Menu by Emily Short

Extension built in to Inform

The Basic Help Menu provides a command HELP (with synonyms HINT, HINTS, ABOUT, and INFO) which will bring up a help menu. The menu includes some introductory instructions about playing interactive fiction, setting controls to manage verbosity and score notification, and a stub introduction.

For any given game, we are likely to want to modify the menu content. The extension defines a Table of Basic Help Options; Table of Instruction Options (which contains the help text); and Table of Setting Options (which lets the player turn score notification and verbosity on and off, but which is not included in the menu by default). We could change any of these by, for instance, selecting and modifying a line when play begins:

When play begins:
     choose row 1 in Table of Basic Help Options;
     now description entry is "This is a game about my grandmother's adventures during World War II..."

We could also add elements to a table by including a continuation in our own game file, so:

Table of Basic Help Options (continued)

title	description
"Contacting the author"	"If you have any difficulties with [story title], please contact me at..."

These additional lines would then be appended to the relevant menu.

We could also replace the Table of Basic Help Options with something else of our own choosing.

The help request rule is not listed in any rulebook.

Carry out asking for help:
     now the current menu is the Table of Joe's Special Help;
     carry out the displaying activity;
     clear the screen;
     try looking;
     stop the action.

... which would not preclude our using the sub-tables defined in this extension elsewhere:

Table of Joe's Special Help

title	subtable	description	toggle
"Instructions"	Table of Instruction Options	--	--

Example: * Basics - A very small game mostly consisting of help.

"Basics"

The Room of Bewilderment is a room. In the Room of Bewilderment is a panel of 57 brass buttons, a trap door, a lever marked DO NOT PULL, a brightly-gleaming sawblade, and a sheet of instructions in Mandarin.

When play begins: say "You step into the Room of Bewilderment with the words of the host ringing in your ears: you can always ask for HELP."

Include Basic Help Menu by Emily Short.

Table of Basic Help Options (continued)

title	subtable	description
"Contacting the author"	--	"If you have any difficulties with [story title], please contact me at..."
"Hints"	Table of Hints	--
"Settings"	Table of Setting Options	--

Table of Hints

title	subtable	description	toggle
"What do I do with the string?"	Table of String Hints	""	hint toggle rule

Table of String Hints

hint	used
"Remember that you know how to macrame."	a number
"Oh, come now, isn't it obvious?"