End of July Link Assortment

Events

August 6 is the next meetup of the San Francisco Bay IF Meetup, and will be conducted online.

The next virtual meetup of the Seattle/Tacoma IF group will be on Sunday, August 21, from 2 – 4 PM PDT via Discord. (This month they’re playing Pytho’s Mask.)

In early September, inkJam will be running to encourage new games written in Ink.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to submit an entry to IFComp this year, you can register your intent to participate as an author any time between now and September 1, and make sure you’re getting email and updates about the competition as the deadline approaches. Actual games will be due September 28.

Inform Evolution

Narrascope has been running yesterday and today. Yesterday, Graham Nelson gave a talk on proposals for upcoming Inform features; the ones under current development/discussion are listed on github.

Among those is a longish proposal for expanding Inform to do better dialogue handling, to which I contributed fairly extensively.

It’s designed to

• support scripting of dialogue for both parser- and choice-based interfaces
• dovetail with Inform’s world model, letting authors script a combination of dialogue and in-world action
• let authors write long continuous flows of dialogue, short re-mixable chunks, or some of each
• allow for lines that belong to specific characters but also lines that can be cast to an appropriate speaker at runtime (e.g. a line for “Any angry person”)
• provide some affordances to support localisation and VO (assuming the author isn’t getting too procedural with the internal content of lines)
  
  This is a proposal at the moment rather than a finished thing, but it’s definitely slotted for development.

New Curiosities

Folly is software to let people play Z-machine parser games on a Remarkable tablet, giving their input in the form of handwritten notes with the ebook pen. There are some fun images of it in play here.