emshortif

Zero Summer: Fifty Miles South of Lexington

In November I wrote about the StoryNexus game Zero Summer. At the time I didn’t play their for-pay content, Fifty Miles South of Lexington, but I’ve done so now, and it deserves its own discussion. Fifty Miles is its own short story, which you can buy from within the main game of Zero Summer using Nex, once you’ve progressed far enough to move around town a bit.

From the StoryNexus perspective, Fifty Miles South of Lexington is pushing the envelope of what the engine can do. Which is a good thing! Every new storytelling engine needs some content that pushes it to or beyond its capacity; that’s how the formal capacities of the machine are discovered. Experimental stuff typically feels just a little bit odd, though, just because it is doing something that may be hacky and weird for the affordances of the toolset. Consequently, the following is a review both of the content of Fifty Miles and a discussion of StoryNexus’ ability to cope with this kind of content.

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CM Release 3

Once again, the Monkey site contains an updated release of CM that doesn’t handle all the bugs reported, but cherry-picks the ones that seem to be causing the most confusion to the greatest number of players, or that were extremely easy to fix.

Among other things, this includes improvements to the handling of the car; greater clarity in the “utilitarian-style” inventory listing about what is being carried in the backpack or worn at the moment; some debugging of issues with hard mode; and the addition of a number of objects that really ought to have been possible to generate.

Rot13’d change log for releases 2 and 3 after the break.

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Interim CM Release

Release 2 of Counterfeit Monkey is available from emshort.com. (I know, it still says release 1 on the website.) This release does not tackle all the bugs that have been reported to me, but it does handle several that were particularly significant to the play experience: one that prevented highlighting from working as it was supposed to, and two affecting the endgame that were under some circumstances preventing people from seeing all the outcomes it should have been possible to see.

I mean to tackle the rest of what’s been reported as well, of course, but as that might take a few more days to complete, I wanted to make this available now.

New SPAG!

After more than a year’s hiatus, SPAG is back with a new issue, in a new hosting space. For those who aren’t familiar with it, SPAG is a long-standing (but occasionally on-vacation) IF community zine with editorials, interviews, and, in the old days, lots of reviews. As IFDB and personal blogs collated at Planet-IF have become review hubs, SPAG’s review content has dropped off a bit: the new editorial direction is moving largely away from reviews. But SPAG is still a useful place for longer articles, interviews, and discussions, so it’s great to see it make a reappearance.

The current issue features interviews with the three top-placing authors from IF Comp, an editorial from the new editor Dannii Willis, and long-form articles about shared-world creation and about detective IF as a genre.

Counterfeit Monkey

Cover art for Counterfeit Monkey Anglophone Atlantis has been an independent nation since an April day in 1822, when a well-aimed shot from their depluralizing cannon reduced the British colonizing fleet to one ship.

Since then, Atlantis has been the world’s greatest center for linguistic manipulation, designing letter inserters, word synthesizers, the diminutive affixer, and a host of other tools for converting one thing to another. Inventors worldwide pay heavily for that technology, which is where a smuggler and industrial espionage agent such as yourself can really clean up.

Unfortunately, the Bureau of Orthography has taken a serious interest in your activities lately. Your face has been recorded and your cover is blown.

Your remaining assets: about eight more hours of a national holiday that’s spreading the police thin; the most inconvenient damn disguise you’ve ever worn in your life; and one full-alphabet letter remover.

Good luck getting off the island.

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Yuletide IF

Archive of Our Own runs a Yuletide project in which participants write each other stories in different fandoms, as a holiday gift. This year’s Yuletide haul includes several IF pieces:

Bigger Than You Think, an astonishing xkcd/Italo Calvino fandom crossover about exploring untold caves. Glulx, but it plays with a hyperlinked keyword interface for greater friendliness.
And a Hippo New Year, a parser-based I7 game hosted on Playfic, in which you play a mouse-sized hippo.
Out of the Night, which deals with the experiences of Dale Cooper after the end of Twin Peaks. Ren’Py, with extensive imagery.

The names of the authors are concealed until Jan 1, but there’s some sweet stuff here. Check it out.