IF Comp 2016 is open for entry.
New Releases
From Christopher Huang, we had the small mystery puzzler Mustard, Music, and Murder. B Minus Seven released At Anchor, a brief and poetic story about searching a beach for items.
I’ve also been hearing good things about Open Sorcery, a sizable Twine game from Abigail Corfman that came out in May. One version is free, but there’s a larger, more expanded version for iOS or Android that you can buy.
Meanwhile, the Texture IF tool has a significant update and now has a library of available works and a number of improvements. The library includes new work from Jim Munroe, Robert Yang, and Jake Elliott. And if your tastes run more to inkle’s tool ink, the new inky project provides an editor for working with that system.
The Willow Effect is a PC-only IF game (so I haven’t tried it). It’s currently gathering support on Steam Greenlight, though the game is also already available on itch.io.
Images Across a Shattered Sea is new from Steward C. Baker on Sub-Q Magazine, though reprinted from Writers and Illustrators of the Future 32. Unless I’m misunderstanding (conceivable!), the original version was non-branching text, and that it has been reworked for Twine: in the current version, it’s structurally an unfriendly gauntlet until the final act, when there are branches leading to two more fully-fleshed outcomes.
It’s an interesting piece for several reasons, but one is that it reads very much as something that comes from the genre expectations of SFF publishing, rather than from the genre expectations of traditional or Twine IF. The first several pages are about setting up the rules of this universe, in order to then explore what they can do.
Coverage
It’s been a good time for IF coverage. Here’s Extreme Tech on the Hadean Lands release, and Rock Paper Shotgun on Killing Time at Lightspeed (not from me!).
Impish Words, Spirited Games is a Facebook page devoted to IF news, if you like following this kind of thing on FB.
BlogHer interviews Melissa Ford about her book introducing Twine for younger writers. Meanwhile, Anna Anthropy has written a kids’ book introducing Twine and other game-making tools; Kill Screen has an interview with her about the project.
Craft
This ctrl500 post on cyclical patterns in dungeon design has some techniques that work for traditional IF maps and multiple-solution puzzles as well.
Related Disciplines
Here’s a review of a tabletop version of an escape room. This sounds slightly strange — the sense of immediate presence is essential to what escape rooms are about, generally — but it sounds potentially entertaining.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
What is that IFComp news site you linked to? I haven’t seen it before and it has no byline, no about, no contact, no provenance, no nothing!
I think this is the hub of the IF Comp, but it’s still ages until the games go public (still time to indicate interest, and polish a game). https://ifcomp.org
I got a mail ostensibly pointing to a July 19th post of yours called “Loose, Tight, Flat, and Bumpy Stats in ChoiceScript Games”, but it seems no such post exists.
What is the difference between a friendly and an unfriendly gauntlet? Where is that written up?
Friendly puts you back on the main path again quickly; unfriendly kills you if you stray. Like a lot of these patterns, it’s written up on Sam Ashwell’s CYOA structures page.