TADS Information
TADS stands for the Text Adventure Development System; it is a programming system I designed for creating interactive fiction. Please visit Neil K. Guy's TADS Page for full details on TADS. Neil's site includes the TADS documentation, plus links to other TADS-related and IF-related sites. If you're interested in writing your own text adventure games, Neil's site is a great place to start.

Software
For the latest TADS software, look in ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/programming/tads/.

TADS 3
Still a work-in-progress, TADS 3 is the latest version of the system, and adds some interesting new features. I have recently made available an early adopter release (you can download the TADS 3 Author's Kit for Windows; this release has the system's foundation in place, but is not quite a complete package for game authors yet.

For the past five years, the readers of the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction have held an annual competition for short works of interactive fiction. If you're not familiar with the competition, check out the 1999 IF Competition home page.

In the 1998 competition, I entered a game called The Plant, which took third place.

For 1999, I didn't enter a game, but I wrote reviews of most of the entries.

I've written several text adventure games using my interactive fiction design tool, TADS.

My most recent game is The Plant, which I wrote for the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition (see above). The story concerns strange events at a mysterious and remote industrial complex. The Plant is a medium-sized game, playable in an evening or two, and is designed to be fun, not frustrating: there's no way to die or make the game unwinnable, and the puzzles are (or anyway are meant to be) reasonable and fair, rather than difficult and obscure.

Previously, I wrote Perdition's Flames, a large game set in Hell. This is a fairly traditional puzzle-solving text adventure, but aims, like The Plant, to be more fun than frustrating: there is no way of making the game unwinnable, and the game has no mazes, carrying limits, hunger, or other similar obstacles.

Before that, Steve McAdams and I co-wrote Deep Space Drifter, a wacky science fiction game. DSD is a fairly large game, with a little bit of storyline and lots of puzzles. This game features two very complicated mazes, so you might want to skip this one unless you really enjoy that sort of thing.

Ditch Day Drifter is set during Caltech's traditional "ditch day" event. I originally wrote Ditch as an example of how to create games with TADS, but at least a few people have found it to be an enjoyable mid-sized adventure game in its own right.