Cover Stories minicomp

Cover Stories was a minicomp in which artists contributed cover art in the first half, and then in the second half authors chose covers they liked and wrote games to fit them. A lot of cool covers were submitted, not all of which got used (alas).

The comp followed the lead of the Apollo 18 Tribute Album project in that it explicitly incorporated a time period for beta-testing and encouraged authors to beta one another’s work. I really like this model, and it seems to result in more consistently polished output than some of the other models. The term “minicomp” isn’t entirely applicable, since it’s really more like a mutually edited anthology, but I’m not going to quibble too much.

I’ve posted reviews of a number of the Cover Stories games I played on IFDB. I especially recommend Olivia’s Orphanorium, a dark comedy about managing a Dickensian orphanage, and Home Sweetie-Bot Home, which rather surprisingly includes a voice-recognition feature allowing you to play the game via speech.

IF Community links and resources

Recent reader email prompted me to revise and expand my guide to ways to get involved with the IF community. But the IF community (or communities, I should say) have been dramatically expanding and diversifying in the last couple of years, and I’m sure I’ve omitted some useful content. Did I miss things you think I should have covered? Events or venues people should know about? Please feel free to comment and I’ll update with whatever seems like a good fit.

No Show Conf, Boston July 14-15

There wasn’t an IF conference alongside PAX East this year, but people may be interested in the No Show Conference, an indie game conference running on the MIT campus July 14-15. It will have something of an IF community presence. (Not me. But other people. Note the talks by Clara Fernandez-Vara, Deirdra Kiai, and Jim Munroe.)

In particular, if you liked last year’s IF Demo Fair, you may be pleased to hear that there’s a demo hall as a significant part of the conference. Interactive fiction games and interface demos are welcome.

Writing for Varytale

As mentioned in a previous post, Varytale is a platform for interactive stories. It’s put together by Ian Millington, the same person who created the Undum tool, but Varytale goes quite a bit further.

Writing Tools

Undum provides a slick front-end and a way to build a few choices and otherwise leaves everything up to the author (hey, you don’t mind learning some javascript to code your story, do you?). It’s been used for a couple of neat IF works, including Deirdra Kiai’s 3rd-place Comp 2011 winner The Play and Andrew Plotkin’s The Matter of the Monster.

By contrast Varytale comes with a complete authoring tool; a website where books are showcased and attractively presented online; the capacity (eventually) to use one of several payment schemes to charge for content; and feedback and statistics tools that allow the author to collect ratings and comments on content, and to see which story choices are especially popular or unpopular. These tools require vastly less coding than traditional interactive fiction, but they do allow for world state and player stats-tracking. (Some time back, I described why CYOA without world state is a bit too restrictive for most of what I want to write.)

Continue reading “Writing for Varytale”

Varytale Analytics

So Bee has been out for a couple of days now in reader beta, and my analytics page overflows.

The Varytale system includes a mechanism by which readers can rate and comment on any individual piece of the story as they go along, giving a one to five star ranking and displaying the average of those ranks as the book’s quality score. The commenting part is well-hidden and of course requires more effort on the part of the reader — I’ve gotten only a handful of comments, mostly to inform me of localized typos or bugs — but the ratings part is almost intrusively prominent.

As a reader, I’m not sure how I feel about being asked to grade what I just read every few paragraphs, so I haven’t actually had the nerve to grade anyone else’s Varytale books; and for that matter even just being asked, “hey, how did you like that?” so frequently relentlessly draws my attention back to an evaluative process when I might prefer simply to experience the story for the time being.

So I have mixed feelings about it as a reader, but it’s the authorial perspective I want to mostly talk about here.

As an author, you get a big chart that ranks all of the ratings of all of your storylets. Analytics results also break down further details about how many people chose each of the several paths through a branching storylet, in what order, and so on. You can see exactly how many people read each storylet, and on which dates. There’s no way to tell for sure when a given reader stopped reading your book, because in theory they could just not have finished it yet, but lots and lots of other metrics are visible.

This is the first time I’ve been able to collect that kind or level of feedback on any of my work, and I am morbidly fascinated. I’m going to show the top and bottom ends of the chart for Bee, which will necessarily be just a tiny bit spoilery for the names of sections in the story.

Continue reading “Varytale Analytics”

Threaded Conversation Public Beta

“Threaded Conversation” is the extension I used to build Alabaster: a large and complex piece of work implementing a lot of my ideas about conversation modeling for use with Inform 7.

Threaded Conversation is capable of handling several styles of interaction: old-school ASK/TELL, something closer to menu conversation, or (the default) a prompted ASK/TELL similar to the default TADS 3 conversation system. It dovetails with some of Eric Eve’s conversation extensions to automatically handle greeting and saying goodbye to characters. Without implementing anything as rigid as a dialogue tree, it has a concept of conversation topics, recognizes when the player significantly changes the subject, allows for NPCs to direct conversation towards areas of their own interest, and is capable of tracking character knowledge separately from the way the character might choose to express that knowledge. I’ve successfully used it for both two-person and multiple-person conversation modeling.

It does not include any built-in features for artificial intelligence on the part of the NPCs, but because it has a concept of “things the NPC wants to say urgently/at some point in the future” that can be freely adjusted, it dovetails reasonably well with author-designed code to determine what the NPCs should want to say next.

The intention had always been to polish and revise this extension and its documentation, then release it for use by the rest of the community. In practice, what happened was that I got it a good way towards the finish line and had an extension that I myself was happy to use, but that was probably incomprehensible to other humans. Occasionally someone would ask me for a copy and I would send it off… and never hear anything more about it, presumably because the people receiving the code weren’t able to do much with it.

Then I changed careers and life paths into one that leaves me a lot less spare time (and where I’m doing enough coding in my day job that my energy when I’m done winds up in other places). The good news, however, is that Christopher Conley stepped forward and volunteered to do the work needed to adapt Threaded Conversation into something other people could use.

He’s revised the code and documentation, and is now looking for volunteers to beta-test the extension and its documentation. If you’re interested, check out his posting on the intfiction forum for contact details.