End of August Links

Events

September 1. The yearly IF Comp is now accepting submissions for this fall. If you intend to enter, you should indicate that by September 1 (so tomorrow — though I imagine most people who are planning to enter will already have sent in their intent).

Sept 2, the San Francisco Bay Area IF Meetup gets together in person.

IntroComp, the very long running competition for just the beginnings of interactive fiction games, is currently running. Entries are available to play, and votes are due September 8.

Sept 17. The Seattle IF Meetup is getting together to play and discuss my multiplayer IF game Aspel. Because the game is hard to play without fellow players, this may be an unusual opportunity to check it out, if you’ve not been able to.

November 4-5, the convention AdventureX is running in London. It’s friendly to many types of narrative game.

Elite Status: Platinum Concierge

Long ago, I started a game for Choice of Games, then titled Platinum Package. When I started it, it was a lighthearted, slightly satirical piece about the world of luxury services and interactions with the wealthy.

Writing it during the period of 2015-2019, though, I found that my own attitudes about wealth shifted to be significantly more critical, and I found myself writing more and more about the challenges of human connection in a world where resources and opportunities are so unequally distributed.

It was always a part-time project, running alongside whatever other work I was doing, and my day jobs were becoming ever more demanding. At a certain point, I realised that I was not sure when (if ever) I would have enough time to work on it further, and that my thematic concerns were pulling it further from being the lighthearted game I originally pitched to CoG. I discussed the issue with them, and they kindly offered an option I hadn’t considered: to involve another, experienced CoG author to finish the game off and bring certain aspects of it back in line with the brand. To do that, they brought in Hannah Powell-Smith, who has written a number of well-received CoG games of their own. They did a lovely job of revising the project, and I’m grateful to Hannah and to CoG for rescuing it.

Elite Status is now available to play. Players have noted that it’s a bit different from the typical Choice of Games piece: it’s not a power fantasy, and while there are romance elements, that is a relatively light aspect of the story. Also, several NPCs have their own preferences and will not be open to dating all possible player characters.

Elite Status also does something a bit experimental, structurally: after chapter 6, the game branches widely and doesn’t come back together until the epilogue sequences; and it chooses its final crisis on the basis of the player’s engagement with particular characters and themes. (When I was first planning the game eons ago, Choice of Robots was one of CoG’s best-regarded pieces, and it branches very widely at that stage too — but not for the same reasons.)

I believe the most difficult of these later game sequences to reach — but also perhaps my favourite from a writing perspective — involves having a strong relationship with your colleague Felix/Felicity, and finding out more of what has happened in their life. If you happen to be hunting for that outcome yourself, try cultivating their friendship; skewing populist and practical but not strong on brand awareness or reputation; choosing a character motivation focused on your own family or financial insecurity; and not being too close to MJ or Ax.

Other Recent or Semi-Recent Releases

Long-time IF author Stephen Granade also recently(ish) released a Choice of Games project, Professor of Magical Studies:

You are a practitioner of pattern magic: an arcane art that allows you to reshape the very nature of reality, with an extra advantage thanks to your synesthesia, which enables you to see patterns more clearly. With a few strokes of a pen on paper, you can draw magical energy from the space between universes to do everything from levitating objects to preserving memories that you can walk through later to creating pocket dimensions.

You’ve just been hired for your first faculty position at Winfield Phillips, the seemingly normal New England college that happens to have a secret magic department. It’s a great first job, or would be except for Darcy Bozeman. Your former school friend used magic to cheat you out of a coveted fellowship, almost derailing your academic career before it began. Now Darcy’s a fellow professor at Winfield Phillips, and is still working to undermine you.

I’ve not yet had a chance to try it out, but player responses rave about the cool magic system and fun romance developments.

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Fans of the Marino Family’s Mrs Wobbles series may like to know that there’s a new story available and a new format for reading it as well: called UnBoxing, it’s available as an ePub.

If you’re not familiar with them, this guest review by Lucian Smith offers a better thematic introduction than I could: they are interactive stories of fostering and adoption, told by a family who knows that experience from the inside.

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Already available on mobile devices and coming soon to Steam, Escape from Norwood is a text game with active NPCs who will carry on acting when you’re not doing anything, as well as supporting maps and illustrations. The game’s tagline bills it as “the depth of a classic text adventure with a modern UI”, and the Steam release also supports screen-readers.

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ParserComp is a competition for parser text adventure games specifically. It ran through the beginning of August this year: it’s too late to vote if you missed that, but if you’d like to check out the results and try some parser-based games, they can be found on itch.io.

Meanwhile, the Single Choice Jam collected games where there was only one meaningful choice presented to the player — an intriguing formal exercise.

And not a new work but an old one: Consider the Consequences, thought to be the first choose-your-own-adventure-style book ever published, is now archived online.

Articles and Reviews

The Rosebush is a web-based magazine for interviews and articles about interactive fiction. It is fairly new, but already features an interview with author Autumn Chen; an article on gender in the 1990s text adventure Christminster; and a piece by Mike Russo on games that use a limited verb set, whether that’s implemented as a limited-verb parser game or as a choice-based game with unusually systemic underpinnings. (Back in 2016 I wrote an article for IF Only about limited-verb parser games; it’s fun to see what’s become of that genre since.)

Tools

Dendry is one of the cooler tools out there for people interested in storylet interactive fiction. It draws heavily on the design of Varytale, but is open source and available to install locally. It’s Dendry that allowed several of us (with thanks to Ian Millington and Autumn Chen) to get my older game Bee working again.

It has, however, been somewhat challenging for people to get up and running on their own, because instead of being a tool available on a webpage, it expects a command-line user comfortable with installing code from Github. The good news: there is now a new tutorial that walks a new user through the process and teaches a first few beats of design with the tool.

Meanwhile, if you’d rather try some storylet work with a more familiar and widely supported language, Ian Thomas has also released an Ink/Unity framework for storylets.

Fundraising

The Colossal Fund raises money every year, partly to fund prizes for IF Competition winners and partly to pay for the activities of the IF Technology Foundation. If you’d like to contribute, you can do so here.