End of February Link Assortment

Events and Deadlines

March 4 sees the SF Bay Area IF meetup.

March 9 is the deadline for intents to enter Spring Thing, which welcomes a diverse range of interactive fiction and allows entrants to participate in the Back Garden if they don’t want to be ranked against other participants.

March 16 is the People’s Republic of IF meetup for those in the Boston/Cambridge area.

April 14 is the deadline to submit content to the Computational Creativity and Games workshop, which describes its aims as follows:

Papers may cover a variety of topics within computational creativity in digital games, including but not limited to:

+Generative techniques that focus on creativity in either approach or content (e.g. procedural content generation (PCG) or automated game generation)
+Automatic evaluation of game content or gameplay
+Automatic gameplay (especially work that focuses on gameplay as performance)
+Co-creative game design tools
+Cultural issues relating to generative software and games or game design
+Surveys, ontologies and reports of computationally creative software in games

New goodies and tools

George Buckenham has packaged up Tracery for use within Unity: this is fairly barebones, but means that if you want to pull Tracery-style text gen into a Unity project, you can.

Bruno Dias now has a Patreon, if you’re interested in supporting his work and getting access to his writing.

New work

Closet

You catch a faint whiff of something familiar.

The stuff in this room must be useless even by artists’ standards, as it hasn’t been disturbed in a while. You note some blocks of wood, a roll of wire, and a huge glass case. Someone’s tool chest is here as well.

The way out of the closet is north; up at the top of the wall is a narrow window leading to the sculpture garden.

>smell

Oh! Um. Sorry to mislead you, but this isn’t really a game about smelling stuff.

Ryan Veeder’s new piece The Roscovian Palladium belongs to that special Veederish genre, Games About Rats. Does it sound like I’m being dismissive? This is the subtitle of the game: “Another game about talking rats by Ryan Veeder.”

It’s pretty charming, and ran me around 15-20 minutes to play, I think. Not nearly as complicated as Captain Verdeterre, but as usual, some great humor in the descriptions and the parser responses.

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Nicholas Brakespear has a new parser-based IF game, The Pilgrimage, on Steam Greenlight. It’s Windows only, so I can’t comment on content, but there’s a free demo available.

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Don’t Make Love is a forthcoming game using freeform natural language input, in which you have to help a mantis couple with their difficult decision about whether or not to mate:

Assume the role of a praying mantis in a couple. Try to maintain the balance between the mutual love and the instinct to have sex to avoid terrible consequences: eating your own partner or being eaten alive. Type your words and lead the conversation, your partner will answer and behave accordingly. Use expressions or actions to convey your feelings in a situation without solution.

Other reading

Liza Daly on ethical AI and procedural generation.

Evan Narcisse on the challenge of portraying blackness in video games.