Mid-October Link Assortment

Events

IF Comp is live now! You can visit the site to play and judge the games. The competition is also still accepting prize donations, in the form of cash or interesting objects, until the end of the judging period.

Ectocomp will be running again this year, with submissions opening October 27, if you’d like to contribute a piece of spooky interactive fiction.

AdventureX runs November 2 and 3 at the British Library — I think it’s already sold out, however, so if you’re attending, you probably already know that.

November 7-8 is Code Mesh 2019 in London.  The conference focuses on promoting useful non-mainstream technologies to the software industry.

Wordplay in Toronto runs November 9-10 this year, showcasing games focused on words, text, and language.

OldGamesItalia is running a game jam for Italian-language games; that’s already in progress, with created games due December 15.

Books

If, like me, you were a kid who enjoyed text adventures in the 80s, you may have nostalgic memories of the Usborne books on how to design and program such things. Usborne have made PDFs of many of those books available on their website (scroll to the bottom).

Aaron Reed has announced Subcutanean, a book where no two copies are ever the same. This is a big procedural text project, and you can sign up to get your own.

Articles

Here are a few things written about IF Comp so far:

• Sam Kabo Ashwell critiques Comp blurbs
• Steph Cherrywell offers an introduction to the competition and how to participate
• This review spreadsheet tracks reviews written by reviewer and by game, so you can see what’s been covered by whom so far

Here’s a making-of piece about how someone created an illustrated interactive fiction piece (in the style of recent, visual-novel-like mobile IF) to propose to his girlfriend, complete with custom art assets of how they both look and the places they’d visited during their relationship.

This article talks about using Python and Raspberry Pi to do lessons in coding and writing interactive fiction. (For more of this kind of thing, see my recent post about pedagogical uses of IF.)

Not related to IF, but I liked this article from a few years ago about how to build organizations that are less likely to foster abusive behavior within their ranks.