Mock Turtle: An Interactive Fiction Prototyping Course

Welcome aspiring interactive fiction authors! By the end of this course, you will have a fully functional game prototype set in Lewis Carroll's Wonderland.

This course guides an individual with zero or minimal interactive fiction authoring experience through the game development process. You select a chapter from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There and rework it into a basic text adventure game prototype. The richness of Lewis Carroll's literature may help the inexperienced author build confidence and begin the mental process of writing dynamic, original works in the interactive fiction genre. The final game prototype may be enjoyed as-is or developed into a more polished game release beyond the scope of the course.

How to Navigate the Course:

This course makes use of documents and worksheets as you progress through interactive fiction game prototyping exercises. Everything that you will need comes bundled in mock_turtle_documents.zip as a separate download.

Unzip the documents into your directory of choice. The course will let you know when a resource is required to complete an activity.

To get the most out of the experience, it is strongly recommended that you follow all of the instructions, consult all the resources, and complete all activities and quizzes before progressing to the next lesson. This course is designed in such a way that each new lesson builds upon the last.

We teach you how to make your final game prototype in Microsoft PowerPoint. You will need a Microsoft PowerPoint license or some other means to create a PowerPoint slide deck. While you may apply these lessons to a specialized IF engine, you may need to adapt Lesson 5: Building the Prototype to the tool of choice. This may require some independent learning outside the scope of this course.

Submit Your Work!

You may submit your final work of IF for feedback from one of our in-house IF enthusiasts. You are welcome to provide the link to your project in the comments section. Please allow for one week so that we can play your game and provide thoughtful constructive feedback. We'll even throw in a signed Certificate of Completion!