GDC 2018

Once again, I’ll be at GDC this year, both speaking and presenting our latest Spirit AI work at a booth in the Expo hall.

If you’re new to GDC and are coming to it from the IF community, I’ve written before about the experience and how to get the most out of it.

If you’re going too, here are a few IF-relevant things to look forward to:

Books on Worldbuilding

In this installment of my monthly writing-books review, I’m looking at a few different guides to worldbuilding. Several of these were designed for science fiction and fantasy novel authors, not for games writers, but some are useful in this territory as well.

koboldKobold Guide to Worldbuilding (free PDF) is indeed written by and for game designers — though sometimes about tabletop RPG design rather than video game design. Still, the tabletop context is relevant to video games.

As anthologized guides go, it’s more varied and less systematic than some. Some sections are essentially post mortems on past projects that might or might not prove particularly relevant to your own process. Others go into detail about the many different sub-flavors of heroic fantasy.

At some points, the contributors are even philosophically at odds. Contributor Monte Cook argues that game world design is fundamentally different from novel world design because you’re looking for enough setting material to drive dozens or hundreds of stories, not just to support a single one. (“…for an RPG, Middle-Earth doesn’t need Sauron; it needs five or six, all in different locales with different motives and goals…”) Later in the book, Wolfgang Baur disagrees, accusing Cook of Kitchen Sink Design.

Quite a lot of the content here is about why you need world-building — what it can accomplish, and how it contributes to genre and the generation of story possibilities — than the how. Steve Winter’s chapter even gets into the question of why monotheism isn’t a popular choice for RPG backgrounds even when so much of the rest is often loosely western medieval.

But there are how chapters as well. Jonathan Roberts makes a pitch for the value of a good map, but then also takes us through an illustrated step-by-step process for layering in geographical features, biomes, nations and smaller landmarks. Other chapters cover , topics as specific as “How to Design a Guild” and “Designing Mystery Cults.”

Continue reading “Books on Worldbuilding”

End of February Link Assortment

March 1 is the deadline to register if you intend to enter Spring Thing 2018; April 1 is the date to actually submit the games themselves, and they’ll become available for people to play on April 5.

March 3 is the next meetup of the SF Bay IF Meetup group.

March 4, Dublin Interactive Fiction Writing Meetup convenes for an introductory lunch.

March 5, there is a reading of procedural literature at the Harvard Book Store (Cambridge, MA) with Nick Montfort, John Cayley, Liza Daly, and Allison Parrish, at 7pm.

March 7, Oxford/London IF Meetup hears from Greg Buchanan on writing for games from IF and indie to AAA projects.

The Opening Up Digital Fiction competition runs through March 15, 2018. (Previously announced as February.) It offers cash prizes and the possibility of future publication.

March 17, Queer Code London holds a workshop on graphical uses of Twine (co-sponsored by the Oxford/London IF Meetup).

I will be at GDC March 19-23, speaking at the AI Summit and present at the Spirit AI expo floor booth.

March 20, Sunderland Creative Writing Festival offers a workshop on writing choose your own ending stories (looks like it’s focused on craft and choice design, and might be non-digital).

Through March 21, the MIT Rotch Library (77 Mass Ave, 2nd Floor) is running an exhibit about computer-generated books called Author Function.

March 26, the Dublin Interactive Fiction Meetup gets together to look at point and click adventure design and tooling.

And further in the future but worth planning ahead for: Feral Vector is May 31-June 2 this year. This is a joyous, playful indie conference in Yorkshire and has always been delightful when I’ve been able to attend. (I can’t make it this year, alas.)

Releases

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine drops today! This is an amazing project dreamed up and developed by Johnnemann Nordhagen — American lore, and America itself as a construction of stories we tell to each other — written by many many authors. I wrote for it. So did Olivia Wood and Leigh Alexander, Cat Manning and Bruno Dias and Kevin Snow, Jolie Menzel and Austin Walker and Matthew S. Burns and even other people yet. The art is beautiful. The music is haunting. Sting did some of the voice acting. (Yes, that Sting, what, did you think there are two Stings?)

Sub-Q has been going strong again, republishing the IF Comp entry Salt but also several brand new pieces: All Those Parties We Didn’t Cry At, Tripladin Massacre, and This is a Picture Book. (Some of these are now a couple of months old — I fell behind mentioning them here, apologies!)

American Angst (Misha Verollet) is now available on itch.io for free, as well as available on Steam. The description:

You wake up in pitch black darkness. You know not where you are. You know not who you are. And they’re trying to kill you…

Imagine a horror novel where you get to make the choices and decide how the story plays out: Welcome to American Angst, a text-based multiple-choice survival horror interactive fiction, combining RPG elements and turn-based combat with dark humor and satire.

A choice-based game slash novel, you try to escape from an underground prison complex – all the while suffering from amnesia, fighting off guards seeking your death, and slowly unravelling the mystery that brought you to this place, as you traverse the thin line between survival and revenge…

Competitions

The French IF Comp has concluded, and the winner is Hansel et Gretel — La Revanche.

Articles and Other Writing

Liza Daly writes about the utopian fiction that inspired her IF Comp piece Harmonia. Part Two, even more extraordinary, covers one of the least-known authors in depth.

Sub-Q has posted a Q&A with last year’s top five IF Comp winners.

This Gamasutra article on dialogue systems by Pietro Polsinelli and Daniele Giardini is many months old, but I just encountered it recently.

Naomi Clark has a magnificent tweet thread on Black Panther.

A Case of Distrust (Ben Wander)

Screen Shot 2018-02-10 at 8.12.52 PM

I mentioned this game in a previous link assortment, but it deserves its own post: A Case of Distrust is a detective adventure by Ben Wander, set in 1920s San Francisco. You’re a female detective who previously spent time (unusually) on the police force, thanks to a policeman uncle who took you under his wing. But now Uncle Lewis is dead, you’re trying to fend for yourself, and the cases are not coming through the door as quickly as you might like. Happily, one does turn up eventually, and you get involved — only to find that the matter escalates while you’re investigating.

Continue reading “A Case of Distrust (Ben Wander)”

Downfall (Caroline Hobbs / lessthanthree )

downfall_cover.pngDownfall is a story game about creating and destroying a culture with a tragic flaw. During the creation portion, you choose a characteristic that is going to be the defining aspect of this new society… and is going to lead to its ruin.

The world-building portion is extremely satisfying — Sam Ashwell’s post gives a good overview of the general concept and functionality here.

In the session I played recently, we started with the flaw of Egalitarianism and a couple of related images (water, lakes, towers), and fairly soon had sketched out Titan Prime, a colony of turrets on an otherwise inhospitable moon. The original colonists had come from Earth generations before, but further ships never arrived, and the colony was now operating more or less independently, recycling all of its water and conserving its resources.

In the next stage of world-building, we established traditions of public and private fashion (everyone always wore uniforms in public); funerals (people were dehydrated for their water, then buried anonymously); justice (judge and jury roles were assigned by lottery, though once you’d been lottery-drafted you did receive some training); family (children were always fostered to someone other than a birth parent); and relationships (there was a complex system to make sure that you didn’t date your birth-sister even despite the fostering scenario). This is a fairly detailed place to get to on a half hour or so of gameplay, and I could easily imagine blending this with other campaign styles, or going over to a game of Microscope here to flesh out the historical events around the story.

The play of actual scenes, I found less tightly constructed.

Continue reading “Downfall (Caroline Hobbs / lessthanthree )”

Mid-February Link Assortment

February 17, the London IF Meetup is doing a Saturday afternoon workshop on using ink and Unity together. This is one of the best methods for creating professional-looking standalone IF applications, and we’ll help you get started with the tools you need.

February 21 is the next meetup of the People’s Republic of IF, in Cambridge MA.

March 1 is the deadline to register if you intend to enter Spring Thing 2018; April 1 is the date to actually submit the games themselves. Spring Thing is the second largest annual IF competition, and runs on slightly different terms than IF Comp in the fall. Among other things, there is usually an option to submit experimental, unfinished, or unusual works in the “Back Garden,” meaning that they are distributed but not ranked or given prizes. It’s a great way to get involved without the actual competition part, which isn’t ideal for all authors or all works.

March 3 is the next meetup of the SF Bay IF Meetup group.

March 4, Dublin Interactive Fiction Writing Meetup convenes for an introductory lunch.

March 5, there is a reading of procedural literature at the Harvard Book Store (Cambridge, MA) with Nick Montfort, John Cayley, Liza Daly, and Allison Parrish, at 7pm.

March 7, Oxford/London IF Meetup hears from Greg Buchanan on writing for games from IF and indie to AAA projects.

The Opening Up Digital Fiction competition runs through March 15, 2018. (Previously announced as February.) It offers cash prizes and the possibility of future publication.

March 17, Queer Code London holds a workshop on graphical uses of Twine (co-sponsored by the Oxford/London IF Meetup).

March 20, Sunderland Creative Writing Festival offers a workshop on writing choose your own ending stories (looks like it’s focused on craft and choice design, and might be non-digital).

I will be at GDC March 19-23, speaking at the AI Summit and present at the Spirit AI expo floor booth.

Through March 21, the MIT Rotch Library (77 Mass Ave, 2nd Floor) is running an exhibit about computer-generated books called Author Function.

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Articles

Anya Johanna DeNiro wrote about my ancient game Pytho’s Mask for sub-q magazine.

Bruno Dias writes about controlling scope in your game.

Joey Jones has a manifesto on puzzle design and incorporating puzzles effectively into narrative.

Releases

amulet.jpgMike Gentry’s 1998 classic Anchorhead is now available in an updated, illustrated version on Steam and Itch, with some new puzzles. Bruno Dias writes about the release for PC Gamer. Mike is even doing a new batch of feelies for the game, including the nifty pewter charm (shown), and a map of the town. A word of warning about this: apparently the contents of the game have changed just enough that walkthroughs for the original version may be unhelpful. But if you want to get hints, you may be able to find help from the good people on the intfiction forum.

Continue reading “Mid-February Link Assortment”