Mid-May Link Assortment

Events

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

May 17 will be the next meeting of the Seattle/Tacoma area IF Meetup, online at 2pm PDT.

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 Oxford and London Meetup currently has nothing concrete scheduled.

June 6 is the next meeting of the SF Bay Interactive Fiction Meetup.

Competitions

Spring Thing 2020 is finished! Winners were announced earlier this month, with three titles taking home a “Best in Show” award for 2020: 4×4 Galaxy by Agnieszka Trzaska, Hawk the Hunter by JonQ, and JELLY by Tom Lento and Chandler Grover. All the entrants are still on the main site and available for play, if you didn’t have time to try them all before the contest ended.

New Releases

Choice of Games has released another title as of just a few days ago. A Squire’s Tale, by Benjamin Appleby-Dean, is a 152,000-word interactive medieval fantasy, set in 14th-century England. The author shares some of his inspirations and behind-the-scenes info in this recent interview.

Meanwhile, Signs of the Sojourner is now available: I wrote about the demo version some months ago, and was intrigued then by what the mechanic allowed the game to express. After writing that up, I was asked to do a small portion of the character writing myself — so I’m no longer an entirely neutral party on this project.