End of April Link Assortment

Events

May 1 (tomorrow!) the London IF Meetup plays Spring Thing games together, 2 PM-5 PM British time.

May 4, the Unnamed IF Book Club meets, also discussing Spring Thing games – though very possibly a different set of them. There are lots of entries this year.

LudoNarraCon, May 5-9, is an event running on Steam focused on narrative-rich games. It showcases various games and demos, and features a line-up of talks and panels.

May 7 is the next meeting of the SF Bay IF Meetup.

Spring Thing is running through May 10, so if you’d like to play and nominate games for ribbons, that’s the place to look. Many folks on the intfiction forum have also been posting reviews, if you’d like to see how other players are approaching the work.

May 15, Ryan Veeder, Lance Campbell, and Polyducks are speaking to the Seattle IF Meetup.

Inform

Inform is now available in a new version in open source; the source is available to read here. This version does not offer huge feature changes at the front end, but it does offer enormous changes under the surface – specifically, that Inform can now compile with other outputs, for instance turning an Inform program into C code.

Andrew Plotkin has some notes on the compilation process.

If you’d like to try playing with it without compiling it yourself, it is available online at Borogove; the traditional apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux are scheduled to be available in mid-May.

Talks and Podcasts

Jude Kampfner interviews different creators about their processes on Creative Confidential; recently she spoke with Matthew Seiji Burns about the thinking behind the visual novel Eliza, which tells a story of an AI-driven therapist.

“The Future of Games is Fan Fiction”: Jake Forbes talks about fan culture and writing games for people from underserved audiences, and the strengths of fan fiction.

Books, Upcoming

Neither of these is available yet, but I’m looking forward to both.

Aaron Reed is working on a book version of his 50 Years of Text Games series; if you’re interested in following that and being notified in time to join in crowdfunding, I recommend following his substack.

Meanwhile, Hannah Nicklin’s forthcoming book Writing for Games: Theory and Practice becomes available for pre-order May 3, and starts shipping after May 24.

While I’ve not yet read the book, I’ve seen a few excerpts, and have also very much appreciated some standalone workshops Hannah has shared, especially one about writing dialogue. I routinely refer people to the resources there – so I’m looking forward to seeing the book.