A Beauty Cold and Austere is a parser-driven text adventure about the awe-inspiring loveliness of mathematics. Its set-piece puzzles range from basics of arithmetic and geometry, through combinatorics and probability, up to linear algebra, calculus, and a wonderful interactive toy that explores the concept of divergent vs convergent series. Along the way, you encounter a … Continue reading “A Beauty Cold and Austere (Mike Spivey)”
The following letter fits right into this month’s topic on procedural generation. I’ve edited (just a little) for length: Hi Emily! I read your chapter in the Procedural Generation in Game Design book, and was really impressed. I tried to follow up on some of the sources you mentioned (e.g. the Spy Feet game) but I wasn’t … Continue reading “Mailbag: Applying Filters to Character Dialogue”
Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (Chris Crawford). Long ago, I wrote about the first edition of this book. Since then, I got to know Crawford a bit, and attended one of his Phrontisterion sessions; he solicited IF community input on a second edition; he kindly sent me a review copy of the second edition, but … Continue reading “Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, second edition (Chris Crawford)”
As part of my prep for the London IF Meetup July 19 (all about writing IF for money), and building on the earlier reviews of books about writing interactive fiction specifically, I thought I’d profile a couple of books that talk about game writing in an industry context — starting with this one: Video Game Storytelling: What … Continue reading “Video Game Storytelling (Evan Skolnick)”
@craigtimpany writes: You’ve covered Versu’s architecture, but I’m curious what that was like to write for… In particular I’ve been wondering how very non linear tools affect a writer’s flow. For those just joining, Craig is asking about Versu, a system focused on agent-driven narrative. Versu and the games made with it are no longer available, but there’s information … Continue reading “Mailbag: Writing for Versu”
Those Trojan Girls is a hypertext novel by Mark Bernstein, written in Storyspace. Storyspace is Bernstein’s project, and the blurb for Those Trojan Girls describes how the tool might add to the possibilities of the medium: Those Trojan Girls is also the first published hypertext to use the new Storyspace 3 facilities for stretchtext and sculptural hypertext … Continue reading “Those Trojan Girls (Mark Bernstein)”
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 