Mid-August Link Assortment

August 22, the long-dormant Seattle IF group is meeting at 7:00 p.m. at Four Generals Brewery in Renton.  The plan is to play through Ryan Veeder’s new game “Curse of the Garden Isle.”

August 23 is the next meeting of the Boston IF group.

Introcomp is live, and invites you to play and judge excerpts of longer interactive fiction games based on how much you’d like to play the rest of the game. This is a long-running IF community tradition that lets participants collect early feedback on their game concepts and works in progress. If you’d like to participate, the games are available here, and voting runs through August 31.

inkle studios has announced ink jam, a jam for people writing in ink, running August 31-September 3.

September 8 is the next SF Bay Area IF Meetup.

If you’re planning to enter IF Comp, you should submit your intent to enter before the beginning of September, as well.

October 6-7, Roguelike Celebration is coming up in San Francisco — this is obviously a bit different from IF material, but there’s some interesting procedural storytelling work that comes up in this space. This year their speakers include Tarn Adams, Pippin Barr, and Max Kreminski, all people who have turned up on this blog/in IF circles before.

November 10-11, AdventureX will return, this time at the British Library. AdventureX is a conference focused on narrative rich games, whether those are mobile or desktop, text-based or graphical; it’s grown significantly in size and professionalism over the last couple of years, and last year pretty definitively outgrew its previous venue. I am mentioning this well in advance because they’ve mentioned that tickets will be cheaper for early bird buyers — so it’s something to keep an eye on if you think you’ll want to go.

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New Releases

Sub-Q runs The Hidden King, a short hypertext piece about lycanthropy and mental illness.

Choice of Games features an interview with Kevin Gold on his new Choice of Magics, out this week.

Also forthcoming is Guardian, a game about a Maori warrior.

Storytron, Chris Crawford’s long on-going project, is now available in open source form. Bill Maya introduces the system and talks about future community efforts here. Chris himself has stepped back from further active development.

Thaumistry: In Charm’s Way, Bob Bates’ classic-style comedy puzzle game, is now available on Android.

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Articles

Sam Ashwell has written up Bluebeard’s Bride, a tabletop storygame about the classic fairy tale and its associated horror and gendered-relationship elements.

Jason McIntosh covers the history of open source interactive fiction and IF tools.

Cecilia Tan talks about “show, don’t tell” writing advice and how tightly coupled that is to whether the reader and writer share cultural assumptions.

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Crowdfunding

Humble Grove is kickstarting No Longer Home, their point-and-click adventure series about leaving university and moving on to adult life.

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Publishing

Mythaxis is seeking IF to include in its upcoming February 2019 issue; however, it does not pay.