Category: Competitions

IF Comp 2012: Living Will (Mark Marino)

Living Will concerns a will that changes dynamically in response to the reader, with the possibility that taking different paths through the will may result in different legacies and messages from the deceased.

Per tradition with my IF Comp reviews, I will have some non-spoilery content after the jump; then if there’s anything spoilery I wish to discuss, it will be separated from the rest of the review with spoiler space.

Disclaimer: I saw this game originally in an unreleased version prior to the comp, at which time I gave some feedback on it. I didn’t bang on it long or hard enough to really claim the title of beta-tester, but nonetheless my comments should be read in light of this favorable predisposition.

Continue reading “IF Comp 2012: Living Will (Mark Marino)”

A Small Roundup of Interesting Things

Storybricks, now fundraising on Kickstarter, is an AI project to allow users to create generated stories in an MMO environment. The project provides an authoring tool for establishing characters’ desires, relationships, moods, and basic conversation:

The engine then brings the results to life within a 3D fantasy kingdom. The Storybricks team has posted a public demo that you can try out for yourself.

Playfic, Andy Baio and Cooper McHatton’s website for playing and writing Inform games online, has had a successful three months, with hundreds of new games posted and (collectively) around 85,000 play sessions. Now Playfic has added the ability (crucial, in my opinion) for authors to include extensions from Inform’s extension site, meaning that supported games can be more complex and make use of a wide range of pre-existing tools.

Cover Stories is a minicomp pairing artists and authors of interactive fiction. The first phase (now over) collected dozens of pieces of cover art; during the second phase (now running), authors may select one of the submissions and write a short game suitable for that cover. There are still some cool images unclaimed. Rules and details may be found here.

IF Comp 2011: The Elfen Maiden / A Comedy of Error Messages

A Comedy of Error Messages is Wodehouse-style comedy — social comedy, romantic entanglements, plenty of misunderstandings — only reimagined for a world where Jeeves is a computer.

A Comedy of Error Messages is Wodehouse-style comedy — social comedy, romantic entanglements, plenty of misunderstandings — only reimagined for a world where Jeeves is a computer.

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IF Comp 2011: The Myothian Falcon

The Myothian Falcon is a neo-noir detective story set in “New Chicago” on a distant planet some centuries in the future. It is long — I didn’t complete it in the two hours available, or even really come close, judging from the walkthrough.

The Myothian Falcon is a neo-noir detective story set in “New Chicago” on a distant planet some centuries in the future. It is long — I didn’t complete it in two hours, or even really come close, judging from how much further the walkthrough went.

Continue reading “IF Comp 2011: The Myothian Falcon”