Category: community

IF Competition Reviews

The annual IF competition is now on! I’m reviewing the games here as I go along, and a number of other people are also doing blog write-ups. Here are the ones I know of:

Peter Nepstad
Victor Gijsbers
Aric Maddux
Gemma Bristow
J. Robinson Wheeler
“Newlin”
Michael Martin
Skeet
ralphmerridew
“Another Mr Lizard”
Joshua H
Wesley Osam
Nick Bronson
Mike Rubin
Nitku
Sarah Morayati (Lucea)
Stephen Bond
Russian reviews (if your grasp of Russian is like mine, namely nonexistent, you may want this comical Google translation instead)
Merk (Mike Snyder)
http://mybloglovesme.tumblr.com/
http://minimumsafedistance.org/ (warning: reviews don’t seem to be cut-tagged)
“Imrihamun”
Carl Muckenhoupt
Cesia (no cut-tags here either; the author claims there are no spoilers, but if you’d rather avoid seeing any information about specific games before you play, you may still want to be cautious)
Octopus Overlords forum (brief, largely unspoilery reviews; no cut-tags)
Wintericecrystal’s Youtube reviews
N. B. Horvath (detailed comments are cut-tagged; overview of comp scores are not)
Lucy
Dan Shiovitz
Jacqueline Lott
Jake Wildstrom (no cut tags)
George Dorn
Christos Dimitrakakis (no cut tags)
Ben Deane (no cut tags)
“Scatmania” (I confess to a little nervousness about the title of this blog, but it does contain reviews for “Violet” and “Grief” so far, and may eventually develop others. No cut tags.)
Auntie Pixelante (no cut-tags, review of Violet only so far)
Sam Kabo Ashwell
David Fletcher
George Oliver
Rob Menke
JDC
Reiko
Jimmy Maher
SPAG 53
Various authors
Something awful forum (comments on Nightfall and Violet mixed in with thread)
Magnus Martyr
Dylan Meconis
“Gaming Dungeon”

A meta-post

There are various good ways to announce projects and cool stuff to the IF community, such as:

  • Posting to rec.arts.int-fiction or rec.games.int-fiction — these get a lot of posts daily and are the main point of contact in the community. If you’re not an IF regular but you want to get the word out about a contest, program, or event to people who are, your best bet is to post there.
  • Sending an announcement to SPAG (which comes out every few months and includes community news) or Brass Lantern (which runs an RSS feed updated much more frequently but with briefer content)
  • Having your own blog which you arrange to have picked up by Planet IF
  • Listing events, tools, or projects at ifwiki
  • Listing new games at IFDB

I mention this because I kinda want to discourage the trend of people asking me to mention/promote things on this blog.

I hope this doesn’t seem curmudgeonly, but there are already places to keep track of IF news. I’d prefer to keep this space for (a) stuff I’m working on myself or (b) stuff I have an opinion about and think is worth sharing. I’m not going to post announcements without looking at what they’re announcements for, but I don’t always have enough time to immediately check out everything that winds up in my inbox. And of course sometimes I look at something and don’t think it’s that interesting. (Bad judgment on my part, I’m sure.)

So… yeah. If you want to email me about something you think is cool, that’s terrific, but you should realize there’s a fair chance that I won’t have time to look it over right away, or that I won’t be moved to talk about it here.

On the IF Cover Art Drive, for Future Reference

…and we’re done! I’ll be contacting authors by email over the next week or so (I have a bunch of addresses I need to look up first), and obtain permission for as many of the submissions as possible. If you’re an author who has yet to respond to a piece, feel free to drop me a line ahead of then, though.

I am thrilled with both the quantity and quality of the submissions, and I want to thank everyone who pitched in: between you, you made sure that art was offered for every single game on our request list and that we ended up with well over 100 games accounted for. For context, when this started, there were at my estimate around 130 games on IFDB with cover art of any kind; scrounging around for commercial covers and posting art from people’s private websites, etc., boosted that to around 240; and now we’re at nearly 300, with a number of covers still to be added if the authors approve them. Admittedly, that still leaves a huge majority of IFDB un-covered — over 3000 games are listed — but I think there’s now enough there to make the site on the whole feel a bit less spartan.

I don’t know that I’ll do this again — it was loads of fun, but I don’t want to promise to make it a yearly event or something. So I wanted to write a few notes in case anyone else wants to do another one later. (There are a bunch of bits where I say “…and this would save the organizer time” — this isn’t meant as a complaint, but I suspect it would be worth streamlining the process if it were going to be a repeat event.)

Details follow the cut.

Continue reading “On the IF Cover Art Drive, for Future Reference”

IF Feed Aggregation

There are an increasing number of IF-related blogs, and now they have their own Planet, so you can find and follow all the news at once. Check it out — and if you also have a blog you think should be included, notice that the right-hand column includes contact information for Christopher Armstrong, who put this together.

Cover Art Drive

IF Cover Art Drive is now officially running. From now until April 30, I am collecting IF cover art on Flickr. There are a few pieces already there, but more will be posted as they’re contributed.

The idea here is to try to collect contributions of art to serve as cover images for existing IF. There are two reasons to do this: first, to make IFDB more attractive and less pure-text; and second, so that people writing about IF on indie game blogs and websites will have something other than a screenshot of raw text with which to illustrate their articles. (More about the rationale for this is here.)

[Edit: for reference, a list of how things stand.]

Cover art submitted and accepted, or submitted by author:

  • The Act of Misdirection, by Callico Harrison
  • An Act of Murder, by Chris Huang
  • Ad Verbum, by Nick Montfort
  • Adventurer’s Consumer Guide, by Øyvind Thorsby
  • All Hope Abandon, by Eric Eve
  • All Roads, by Jon Ingold
  • And the Waves Choke the Wind, by Gunther Schmidl
  • Attack of the Yeti Robot Zombies, by Øyvind Thorsby
  • Augmented Fourth, by Brian Uri!
  • Bad Machine, by Dan Shiovitz
  • Balances, by Graham Nelson
  • The Baron, by Victor Gijsbers
  • The Beetmonger’s Journal, by Scott Starkey
  • Being Andrew Plotkin, by J. Robinson Wheeler
  • Blighted Isle, by Eric Eve
  • Blue Lacuna, by Aaron Reed
  • Breath Pirates, by Mike Snyder
  • The Chinese Room, by Harry Giles and Joey Jones (pending revisions)
  • Coke Is It!, by various
  • The Cove, by Kathleen Fischer
  • Cryptozookeeper, by Robb Sherwin
  • Dangerous Curves, by Irene Callaci
  • A Day for Soft Food, by Tod Levi
  • Degeneracy, by Leonard Richardson
  • Desert Heat, by Papillon
  • Distress, by Mike Snyder
  • The Djinni Chronicles, by J. D. Berry
  • The Edifice, by Lucian Smith
  • Enlightenment, by Taro Ogawa
  • An Escape To Remember, by IF Whispers
  • Fate, by Victor Gijsbers
  • A Fine Day for Reaping, by James Webb
  • Fine Tuned, by Dennis Jerz
  • Firebird, by Bonnie Montgomery
  • For a Change, by Dan Schmidt
  • Gardening for Beginners, by Juhana Leinonen
  • Gourmet, by Aaron Reed
  • The Gostak, by Carl Muckenhoupt
  • Help! My Vacuum Cleaner is Broken!, by Admiral Jota
  • In the End 2, by Adam Thornton
  • Katana, by Matt Rohde
  • King of Shreds and Patches, by Jimmy Maher
  • The Land of the Cyclops, by Francesco Cordella and Simone Di Conza
  • LASH, by Paul O’Brian
  • Learning to Cross, by Mark J. Musante
  • Legerdemain, by Nathan Jerpe
  • Letters from Home, by Roger Firth
  • Losing Your Grip, by Stephen Granade
  • Lost Pig, by Admiral Jota
  • Luminous Horizon, by Paul O’Brian
  • Lunatix — The Insanity Circle, by Mike Snyder
  • Lydia’s Heart, by Jim Aikin
  • Masquerade, by Kathleen Fischer
  • Moon-Shaped, by Jason Ermer
  • Mother Loose, by Irene Callaci
  • My Name is Jack Mills, by Juhana Leinonen
  • Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina, by Jim Aikin
  • Nothing But Mazes, by Greg Boettcher
  • Pass the Banana, by Admiral Jota
  • Persistence of Memory, by Jason Dyer
  • Photograph, by Steve Evans
  • Revenger, by Robb Sherwin
  • Rameses, by Stephen Bond
  • Ribbons, by J. D. Berry
  • Scavenger, by Quintin Stone
  • A Simple Theft, by Mark Musante
  • Snowblind Aces, by C. E. J. Pacian
  • Square Circle, by Eric Eve
  • Tales of the Traveling Swordsman, by Mike Snyder
  • The Tarot Reading, by Michael Penman
  • To Hell in a Hamper, by J. J. Guest
  • Trading Punches, by Mike Snyder
  • Treasures of a Slaver’s Kingdom, by S. John Ross
  • Undertow, by Stephen Granade
  • Voices, by Aris Katsaris
  • Waystation, by Stephen Granade
  • The Weapon, by Sean Barrett
  • Wearing the Claw, by Paul O’Brian
  • Whom the Telling Changed, by Aaron Reed
  • Worlds Apart, by Suzanne Britton

Cover art submitted and declined; submitted and unanswered; or supplanted by other art:

  • Aisle, by Sam Barlow
  • Anchorhead, by Michael Gentry
  • Chicken and Egg, by Adam Thornton
  • Choose Your Own Romance, by David Dyte
  • Christminster, by Gareth Rees
  • The Corn Identity, by IF Whispers
  • Deadline Enchanter, by Alan DeNiro
  • Delusions, by C. E. Forman
  • A Dino’s Night Out, by Aris Katsaris
  • Downtown Tokyo, Present Day, by John Kean
  • Elizabeth Hawke’s Forever Always, by Iain Merrick
  • Goldilocks is a FOX!, by J.J. Guest
  • Guess the Verb!, by Leonard Richardson
  • House of Dream of Moon, by IF Whispers
  • Janitor, by Peter Seebach and Kevin Lynn
  • Lost New York, by Neil deMause (would prefer no future cover art be created)
  • The One That Got Away, by Leon Lin
  • Rematch, by Andrew Pontious
  • Shade, by Andrew Plotkin
  • She’s Got a Thing for a Spring, by Brent VanFossen
  • Sins Against Mimesis, by Adam Thornton
  • Sting of the Wasp, by Jason Devlin
  • Theatre, by Brendon Wyber

Cover art submitted:

  • A Change in the Weather, by Andrew Plotkin
  • Delightful Wallpaper, by Andrew Plotkin
  • Hunter, in Darkness, by Andrew Plotkin
  • Spider and Web, by Andrew Plotkin

Cover art in progress:

Cover art requested:

Cover art “opted out”:

  • Building, by Poster

Continue reading “Cover Art Drive”