Some background from Michael Cho on his illustrations for Everybody Dies, including pencil sketches for a couple of the illos.
Category: interactive fiction
…which wasn’t that long a wait
The IF Comp results are now up.
Congratulations to Violet, Nightfall, Everybody Dies, and the rest!
More comp reactions, while we wait for results…
On the intfiction forum, a few of the authors have posted comments now that Rule 5 no longer applies.
Some new review sets have been posted (see my roundup entry for the ones I know about so far — everything after Auntie Pixelante’s blog is fresh material from the last day or so).
Alabaster Interim Status Report (Release 18)
I am still working on Alabaster’s edited beta; in case anyone is interested, I’ve posted the latest build (18), but this should be regarded as just an interim thing while I continue to work on a release candidate that can be sent around to testers.
Continue reading “Alabaster Interim Status Report (Release 18)”
Preparing a game for testing
Shamus Young has some interesting comments on parsing in IF and how he thinks it could be improved; Mike Rubin has a response. Partly this comes down to an argument in favor of juiciness in IF games, with some crowd-sourcing ideas for how to accomplish that juiciness. Eric Idema’s ifrotz project seems actually fairly relevant to all this, since it looks as though it might enable some of the things Shamus imagines, in terms of group testing.
This is all potentially valuable. It touches on only part of the quality-assurance problem, though, as this year’s comp crop reminded me. We tell authors to have their games tested thoroughly and to give themselves lots of time for the testing process (all of which is good advice), but in my experience it is difficult even for diligent testers to get a game up to an ideal state of polish if the author hasn’t done a certain amount of anticipation to start with.
Alabaster Processing
So general submissions for Alabaster are closed, and I’m working on incorporating the last changes that I was sent. Thanks everyone who participated — this has been really useful and interesting, and I have hopes that the end product will be interesting as well.
My plan at this point is to
— work on the file myself a while (debugging, optimizing the code, tying off some conversational loose ends that no one wrote any conversation for)
— beta-test the game (I usually hold closed beta tests, but since this has been an open project an open beta seems more appropriate as well); this will also be an opportunity for collaborators to comment on how their contributions were interpreted or add any finishing touches that they wanted to add
— upload to the archive and add IFDB info, at which point the game will be considered officially released.
What follows here is mostly a postmortem on the experiment, with some further thoughts.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 