For IF Comp 2015, I offered as a prize to contribute a piece set in the same universe as the author’s game. Steph Cherrywell chose this prize for Brain Guzzlers from Beyond!, which was exciting, since I’d enjoyed Brain Guzzlers a lot; and also slightly daunting, since Steph obviously didn’t need any help in coming up with … Continue reading “The Mary Jane of Tomorrow”
(Belatedly, because I was in a place without good wifi for a few days after the conference, apologies:) Thursday was the day of Lost Levels, when folk coalesce in the Yerba Buena Gardens for unconference-style talks about subjects dear to them. It’s a good place to find altgames conversations; and as it happens, Kate Compton … Continue reading “GDC Highlights, Thursday/Friday”
Sometimes people write to me asking for suggested lists of interactive fiction that fit particular criteria. When that happens, I like to publish the results to my blog rather than just answer by email — both in order to establish a resource for other people in the future, and in case commenters here have additional thoughts … Continue reading “Readerly Experiments in Narrative Form”
Black Closet is a dating sim/resource-juggling sim from Hanako Games (Long Live the Queen, Date/Warp, and numerous others). In it, you are Elsa Jackson, the student council president at St. Claudine’s, an all-female Catholic boarding school. (I hadn’t heard of St. Claudine before this game, but it was satisfying to look her up and discover that … Continue reading “Black Closet (Hanako Games)”
ProcJam happened last month, pulling together lots of different awesome things: A procedural château generator (or perhaps you’d prefer a procedural Palladian façade generator). A Twitter bot that tweets about odd clothing combos. Ordovician generates strange sea-creatures that swim across your screen: But I was most fascinated by the pieces that do procedural work with words. … Continue reading “ProcJam Entries, NaNoGenMo, and my Generated Generation Guidebook”
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 