End of January Link Assortment

Events

February 4th, San Francisco, the SF Bay IF Meetup will get together to play the IGF-nominated Event[0]; several other potential games are also on the agenda.

February 9th, Nottingham, Hello Words, a new interactive fiction writer’s group, is meeting to talk and play Victor Oujel’s Ariadne in Aeaea.

February 16th, Boston, the People’s Republic of IF gathers for their monthly meeting.

New Releases and Updates

Forgotten is a Twine game made by Sophia Park and Arielle Grimes, with Emilie Sovis providing sound design. It’s a horror piece in which you boot up an old, glitching copy of Forgotten Realms and explore the decaying landscape.

Remanence is a short Twine piece by Stephanie Chan, in which you rob a memory-bank.

20Something is a Twine on Steam, touching on the miseries of dating. (It’s not free, and I haven’t tried it, so I can’t offer much more guidance than that.)

Timecrest, which has been covered before on this blog, has added an accessibility update that provides comprehensive features for users who are blind or vision impaired, and was awarded “Best iOS Game” and “Developer of the Year” by the AppleVis Golden Apple Awards.

February 3, House of Many Doors launches: HOMD is strongly inspired by Sunless Sea, but features procedurally generated poetry and its own particular tone.

And speaking of procedural generation and large worlds: Voyageur, a procedurally-generated text game by Bruno Dias, is set to release on February 7th. It’s a literary RPG about exploring a galaxy in which the planet descriptions, goods, and choice-based encounters are generated from a custom corpus.

Jams and Competitions

March 9th is the registration deadline for Spring Thing.

Utopia Jam, hosted by Laura Michet and Cat Manning, runs from February 11th to February 27th.

Resources

Jeremiah McCall has put together a basic introduction to links in Harlowe for audiences without a lot of coding experience. Further expansions are yet to come.

John Timmons’ IF Snippets, a collection of short Inform 7 works written as introductory assistance to the form, were broken on the Inform 7 website but have been reposted here.

Carolyn VanEseltine has a useful article about when to decide to build your own IF engine, which addresses a number of “is there any point/market” questions.

Crowdfunding

Several of these this time. Bob Bates’ Thaumistry Kickstarter has already been covered on this blog. There’s also Kevin Snow’s Southern Monsters, an interactive text game about monsters and disability in which you hunt cryptids through the swamps of Arkansas, and which has reached almost 80% of their goal.

And of course, Failbetter launches their Kickstarter for Sunless Skies on February 1st. (Disclosure: I sometimes work for Failbetter and may benefit from a positive outcome of that Kickstarter.)