alton_brown_geek_motivator[1]OK, this will be a special early post so I can get the link out there.  This month we’re hosting Dinner Club, and rather than our usual Iron Chef-style theme ingredient, we decided to go with an Alton Brown theme.

Part of the reason is that we’ve been watching a lot of Good Eats lately in the evenings after the two older kids are in bed but while Jonathan is still active.  Usually the choice is between Star Trek TNG and Good Eats as to decent shows to watch, and Alton has more… general appeal, shall we say.

So we came up with a comfort-food menu based on Alton Brown’s recipes, but I had a brainstorm after finishing the menu:  I’ve been working on interactive fiction lately — why not make an interactive menu?

I didn’t have enough time for that, but I did put together a short, themed interactive fiction work, loaded with Alton Brown quotes and quote-look-alikes, to serve as a companion piece — an appetizer if you will — to this month’s dinner club.

I used a couple of 3rd-party extensions and the core of one of my own proto-extensions to speed development, and after about 3-4 hours of work I ended up with “Good Eats”, an interactive menu.  Click on the link to run it directly in your web browser through Parchment, a Javascript interpreter.  The reason you can do this with this game and not with my competition game is because this one is small enough to fit in the old Infocom Z-machine format, which is the only one currently supported by Parchment.  You can, of course, also download the file directly and play it on your favorite standalone interpreter.

I hope you enjoy “Good Eats” as much as I enjoyed making it!  It was a nice break from longer, more involved projects; I now see the appeal Speed-IF has for participants where I didn’t before.