Category: announcements

More Extension Updates

Have just sent in a couple of fixes for extensions to do with description.

Version 10 of Room Description Control: a minor fix to get rid of deprecated phrases. If you’re not worried about the presence of “change foo to bar”, there’s no need to update this one.

Version 4 of Single Paragraph Description: a significant bug fix. Changes to Inform internals meant that SPD was incorrectly noting which items needed to be reported in the room description. The new version gets rid of the crufty I6 inclusions of the previous version — which weren’t working right now anyway — and replaces them with native I7. It also introduces the feature of respecting BRIEF and SUPERBRIEF: in those cases, it won’t print the description text for the current room, but will still list non-scenery items.

These should show up on the extensions website soon.

Minor extension updates: Approaches, Measured Liquid

Just mailed off a couple of extension updates:

Version 4 of Measured Liquid fixes a bug whereby unblocking the rule against swimming in a lake didn’t actually make it possible for the player to swim there. A new example tests this behavior to guarantee its compliance in future builds. There is also a tiny cosmetic tweak to a situation that arose only when an NPC had been commanded to drink a liquid and that was producing the output

Clark drinks the crantini, leaving the empty cocktail glass empty.

The first “empty” is now omitted from output, as it was for the player.

Version 4 of Approaches removes remaining deprecated “change” phrases (I swear I thought I’d already taken care of that, but hey ho) and also gets rid of a bug that produced a runtime error in the example “Easy Keys.” (Tighter type-checking in Inform wasn’t letting it get away with something that had worked previously.)

These should appear on the Inform extension page in due course.

@party Interactive Fiction Competition

A signal boost for a competition accepting IF:

@party 2011, a demoparty held in Harvard, Massachusetts, 30 minutes outside Boston, has an interactive fiction competiton.

Remote entries are due June 13, 2011. Onsite entries are due 12:30 PM on Saturday, June 18.

Rules
* Games cannot be more than approximately a half-hour in play length.
* Most formats are acceptable, but Z-Machine is preferred.

Check out our website, atparty-demoscene.net, for more info.

The same competition last year is the context for zarf’s Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home.

“Inventing the Future of Games” Symposium

April 15, the UC Santa Cruz Center for Games and Playable Media is hosting a one-day symposium on the future of games, where I’ll be speaking on characters and conversation. I’m very much looking forward to it; and if any of you are in a position to come, you’ll also get to hear from Jordan Mechner, Will Wright, Rod Humble, and all these people.

The IF Theory Reader is available

This news is a little old because of my being at GDC, but it’s worth amplifying the signal anyway: the IF Theory Reader, aka the IF Theory book, now exists, thanks to Kevin Jackson-Mead’s dedication in reviving it from an undead state. It can be downloaded as a free PDF, or purchased in physical form for about $14 American.

Some of the articles in it have been revamped. I substantially rewrote my article on IF geography to talk more about route-finding across a map, status line compass roses, and other navigation and UI elements that have come much more into vogue since the article was written. My piece on conversation I rewrote less extremely, but still adjusted here and there.

That’s not to say that old = useless. The book opens with Roger Giner-Sorolla’s article Crimes Against Mimesis, posted years ago on the rec.arts.int-fiction forum. That series of posts formed the starting point for many, many long discussions about game design, storytelling, and simulation in the years to follow. Other selections include a lot of coverage of different areas of IF craft — writing room descriptions, designing puzzles, coming up with NPC dialogue — as well as some more theoretical discussions.

Preview of the IF Demo Fair

The IF Demo Fair will be held from 8:00 to 10:00 PM on Saturday, March 12, in the Alcott conference room at the Westin Boston Waterfront Hotel adjacent to PAX East 2011 (map). No PAX badge is required to attend. This is an IF community event sponsored by the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction.

We have 23 pieces, including interactive poetry, journalism, and documentary; experiments with styles of interaction that go beyond the puzzle, and modes of input other than the standard parser form; new prototype authoring tools; and new interpreters, both serious and whimsical.

Here are some highlights:

The XYZZY-nominated Automatypewriter, Jonathan M. Guberman and Jim Munroe. Like a more literate cousin of the player piano, the automatypewriter is a manual typewriter that types by itself, and takes input. You may have seen the video online where an early version of this project plays Zork — the one being showcased here is an entirely different typewriter, playing a custom-built interactive fiction piece by Jim Munroe (Everybody Dies, Roofed).

A new way to interact with fiction from Jonathan M. Guberman on Vimeo.

what if im the bad guy?, Aaron Reed, UC Santa Cruz. Exploring a frozen battlefield moment from a half dozen violently conflicting perspectives, this prototype (part of the author’s work towards a digital arts MFA) merges traditional IF with video, sound, and web conventions. Inspired by the currently unfolding trials of six US Marines accused of committing war crimes in Afghanistan, the project asks what interactive stories can say about contemporary, real-world events, and wonders if there can be such a thing as an IF documentary.

Vorple user interface library, Juhana Leinonen. Vorple is a JavaScript user interface library designed to be used together with interactive fiction and hyperfiction systems. Vorple provides an additional user interface layer on top of existing web interpreters and systems. Story and library authors can build user interface and web elements the underlying system might not support natively. Through Vorple, stories can display YouTube videos, pull data from Wikipedia, communicate with Twitter or Facebook, integrate to blogs, or use any other services and techniques available for web applications.

Procedurally Generated Narrative Puzzles, Clara Fernandez Vara, Michaela Lavan, Alec Thomson, Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. This project focuses on methods to generate narrative puzzles procedurally. The point-and-click game Symon was a proof of concept of what an adventure game would be like if players had the chance to restart the game and get different puzzles, because they were being generated by the system. The project here presented are a set of tools for designers which eventually should be compatible with different development environment, including those dedicated to interactive fiction. The tools include a series of building blocks to build puzzle patterns, and a database editor, which designers can use to create the characters and items involved in the puzzles.

Also to look forward to:

  • Combat and conversation demos from Bob Clark, Victor Gijsbers, and Robb Sherwin
  • New browser interpreters by Dave Cornelson and Alex Warren
  • Nick Montfort’s Curveship system for narrative variance
  • Adam Parrish’s Frotzophone interpreter, which interprets changes to the object tree in the Z-Machine into music