Category: interactive fiction

Introcomp 2010

Introcomp, the yearly competition for the beginnings of IF games, is enjoying an unusually strong year this year, with quite a few entries and fairly high quality overall. My thoughts — mildly spoilery — follow the cut. If you’re interested in playing the games and forming an opinion yourself, I encourage you to do so. I’ve also truncated my RSS feed for the time being so that the content here won’t syndicate to Planet-IF, as is my usual custom during competitions. I’ll turn it back to full strength soon.

So:

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Readings, News

A new post from the Echo Bazaar folk, on choices in games — including what they call the “reflective” choice, which invites the player to think about why he’s doing something, or act expressively, without necessarily expecting the game to pick up on that. We’ve seen that in IF in a few places. Certain portions at the beginning of Blue Lacuna do this thing of collecting responses from the player without using them to affect the world model — but they certainly affect the experience of playing and the meaning of the story.

PAX Prime is going to feature an IF panel and its own IF suite! (That’s Seattle, Sept. 3-5.) But tickets are selling quickly. If you want to go, you may want to make your plans soon.

Two links

Enthusiastic, spoilery review of Make It Good from someone who doesn’t generally seem to be a big fan of IF.

Cellcraft, an RTS-style game about cellular biology, from the creator of Super Energy Apocalypse. More thorough review to follow later, but the short version is: I think the tutorial is paced wrong, and the interface has a few dozen things that I would tweak. On the other hand, by the end I was thoroughly enjoying this despite the quirks, and recalling some things about golgi bodies and the endoplasmic reticulum that I haven’t thought about for quite a while. And the silly, cute story provides a bit of motivation for the whole thing.