Graham A. Nelson (born 1968) is a British mathematician, poet, and the creator of the Inform design system for creating interactive fiction (IF) games. He has authored several IF games, including Curses (1993) and Jigsaw (1995).[1] (wikipedia)
The most frequent complaint is that it's hard. True. it's a hard game to win Also, many people ask me how to use the secret debugging commands, apparently under the impression that I'll tell them.
The time has mainly gone on getting Inform into a decent shape for public use. I suppose the plot of 'Curses' makes a sequel conceivable when compared with, say, the plot of 'Hamlet' but none is planned.
Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that.
What I would pay much more attention to are the few points where the player can inadvertently make a career decision. Most players end up back-tracking, though some actually enjoy this.
For a fortnight nobody at all emailed me, or posted a follow-up. Doesn't anyone care, I thought? It turned out my newsreader was broken, and hadn't posted at all.
With 'Curses,' I had a rough design in mind already, and in about a fortnight had the attics, the Unreal City and the garden fleshed out.
I have been working on a more serious game, called 'Jigsaw', for about 18 months, but don't hold your breath. it'll be a while arriving.
Once the announcements were actually heard, there was a slow but gathering response. by the end of the first year, an avalanche.
If pushed, though, I'd say that the next stage will be reached when it it's no longer true that about 75% of the best games were written in 1980's on the way to that.
Eventually I found it had been working all along-but didn't show anything on screen until it had the first full page of text. I inserted 30 new lines, and suddenly my toy said 'hEllO woRlD'. An hour later I understood alphabet shifting rather better!