Author: emshortif

fugue

A very short-short, not-very-game-like piece of mine has been published at Up Right Down. URD is all about retellings of the same story, so fugue won’t make much sense unless you read the basic plot and instructions. This one isn’t particularly directed at the IF community — it’s intentionally tiny, puzzle-less, and unresponsive to most of the standard IF verbs. But the story struck me as something I could work with and the constraints resonated well with the conversation-system experiments I was doing, and it all just kind of gelled.

I’ve always been a sucker for multiple tellings of the same story anyway.

It’s also an early application of Flaxo, a program I am liking more and more. I have had some trouble running ZMPP et al from my mindspring site, but Flaxo works fine. I’m not ready to use it to host longer games yet, since it doesn’t yet let the player restart and restore — but for something that’s only half a dozen moves or so to start with, that’s less of a problem. And Flaxo looks quite pretty as browser-based IF interpreters go.

IF Beginner’s Comp games

Spoilery, IF-Comp-style comments on the games for the IF Beginner’s Comp. If you haven’t played these and you intend to play them, you should do so before reading these reviews.

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Okay, here goes nothing

So a little while ago I commented on the absence of cover art for IF games, and several people posted saying they didn’t feel like they had the skills/wherewithal to make art for their own games. I somewhat rashly suggested we should have some kind of cover art drive, whereby people could contribute art for other people’s games, and this met an initially positive response.

Continue reading “Okay, here goes nothing”