End of April Link Assortment

May 5 is the next meeting of the SF Bay IF Meetup.

May 7, voting closes for the games in Spring Thing, so there’s still time to play and vote on some games if you’re interested in doing that.

We actually have two Oxford/London IF Meetup events this month, both centered on procedurality, text, and dialogue, but aimed at different skill and experience levels:

May 12, we have a workshop on Spirit AI’s Character Engine, which will get comfortable authors who are comfortable using Unity up and running with the tool, and allow them on-going use of the SDK. This is a first introduction to this engine, so no prior experience authoring with Character Engine is expected, but technical comfort with Unity and some experience writing procedural text will both be useful.

May 19, the Oxford/London IF meetup does a workshop on Tracery and building your own Twitter bots. For those who are interested in just getting started with procedural text generation and doing something fun with it in a short amount of time, this is ideal for you.

Feral Vector is May 31-June 2 this year. This is a joyous, playful indie conference in Yorkshire and has always been delightful when I’ve been able to attend. (I can’t make it this year, alas.)

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I talked with Dark Pixel about NPC interaction in games, what we can do with AI, and what we’re currently working on at Spirit AI:

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Releases

The Life We Wanted is a story by Leigh Alexander about constructed women and AI. This is not an interactive story, but it touches on topics around AI, identity, and gender that might be interesting to readers of this blog; it’s subtle and often slyly funny; and there are individual sentences that I was still thinking about days after reading. Highly recommended.

Crowdfunding

inkle now runs a Patreon for ink, so if you want to support its growth and development, you can contribute there.

Reviews

Liza Daly has written capsule reviews for almost all the games in Spring Thing this year.

Aaron Reed is doing a series of posts about particular choice moments in games; this one discusses the Black Crown Project and its realization in StoryNexus, which is especially interesting for students of quality-based narrative.

Previews

Here (from EGX Rezzed) is a bit more background on Sunless Skies (forthcoming from Failbetter):