Mid-September Link Assortment

IF Comp goes live in a couple of weeks.

If you’d like to submit a game for presentation at WordPlay, the Toronto word-based-game festival, you still have until September 30 to do so. Accepted pieces will be displayed to the public as part of the festival, and the creators will receive an artist fee of 80 CAD.

Community Feedback

IFTF is running a survey about how people use IFDB and how the experience could be improved. You can let them know your views at the link attached.

New and forthcoming releases

Jam City has started a new line of interactive fiction in the mold of Choices and Episode, using a model that includes pay-to-unlock premium choices, but also a subscription option. (At $2.99/week, this is a bit more expensive than Fallen London’s Exceptional Friendship, and I wonder whether people will find a weekly sub more appealing than monthly. My instinct says no, but my instinct is often wrong.)

IF author and sometimes-conference-organizer Jim Munroe has been working on a new VR project called Manimal Sanctuary. It’s pitched thus:

Manimal Sanctuary is a lurking simulator. It leverages low-end VR technology to enable every player’s ultimate fantasy: to play a creature part coral reef, part Cthulhu, who consumes human emotions. Set on the Toronto Islands after the rest of the city is consumed by gibbering monstrosities, you eavesdrop on the survivors and their dramas involving things like bad potato crops and graffiti tags. And if those everyday emotions aren’t filling enough, you can always uncover some devastating secrets…

Naomi Clark’s Consentacle is now on Kickstarter. It is a card game about consent and mutual agreement, and I would be hard-pressed to describe it more than that. If you want your own print of the game (perhaps from seeing it played at GDC, as I did), this may be your one and only opportunity.

Misha Verollet has released a trailer for American Angst, a forthcoming choice-based game:

*

A total tangent: possibly I’m one of the few people who remembers this, but did you know that well before YouTube or the current trend for trailer-making for games, there was a TrailerComp for parser-based IF. The main thing I remember is that Fallacy of Dawn had a trailer set in part to “Smooth Criminal.”