End of April Link Assortment

Events

May 2 is the next meeting of the SF Bay Interactive Fiction Meetup.

May 11-25 will feature a high-speed Inform 7 Boot Camp taught by Judith Pintar, in connection with NarraScope. Details are still being ironed out, so watch the NarraScope page for updates.

May 16 will be the next meeting of the Baltimore/DC IF Meetup, online at 3pm.

The weekend of May 29-31 was originally supposed to feature NarraScope as a live event in Urbana-Champaign, IL. Unsurprisingly, NarraScope has been moved to a virtual-only model (you can read the full statement here). Due to the changed format, the event is now free to anyone who wants to register, although donations are welcome from those who have the income and wish to show support.

More recently, a schedule of events was released, featuring a full slate of workshops and seminars. For those curious about recent developments with Inform 7, Graham Nelson is leading a seminar on Thursday May 28, at 5:00pm (GMT+1).

The Boston IF Meetup is still expecting to get together for an online May event, however an exact date has not been set. Keep track of updates here. The Oxford and London Meetup currently has nothing concrete scheduled.

Competitions

Spring Thing 2020 is on the home stretch, ending on May 3. If you plan on playing any of the multiple entries in this year’s garden, time is short. Winners will be announced as the festival ends.

New Releases

Choice of Games introduces Mask of the Plague Doctor, a 410,000-word interactive novel by Peter Parrish, which is cleverly advertising itself as a “swords and surgery” medieval fantasy. It’s perhaps a bit odd that the title has come out in the midst of a global pandemic, but also worth noting that the game has been in development for nearly two years.

Stephen Granade also has a recently published Binary, in which a woman must decide what to do with a digitally uploaded personality that she has discovered on the wreckage a space station. A full interview with the author can be found here.

Articles, Posts, & Podcasts

Due to the coronavirus situation, the folks at Storium have recently made their service free through the end of June. As a result, there has been a large influx of new players using the service. To help new players, the Storium Arc fan podcast is conducting a series of mini-episodes designed to help new players learn the ropes.

If you’re looking for entertaining diversions, Stephen Granade (mentioned above) hosts weekly “Let’s Play” streams on Twitch, every Saturday at 4pm EDT. So far, he has taken viewers through Animalia, Zozzled!, and Fragile Shells. He is also archiving the videos on YouTube, as Twitch only keeps videos up for a short time.

Job Postings

My employer, Failbetter Games, is currently hiring a writer and narrative designer. We’re all working remotely right now, so we can potentially hire from outside the UK, though the ability to overlap with our core 11-4 UK hours is still needed.

The job description covers the key points.

If you’re interested in the things I typically blog about — narrative design, choice construction, structural thinking, the intersection of numbers and stories — this may be very much your kind of job. We have multiple kinds of interesting challenges to work on, a very supportive studio, and some really excellent colleagues.

If you think this might be you, please please do apply.