IF Comp judging ends today — you may have a few hours left to register your opinions, if you wish — and results will be available soon.
Today also marks the beginning of fos1’s jam for TADS games, which will run through early 2022. This is intended to invite more authors to try out the TADS system and put some fresh energy into that ecosystem.
November 21, the Oxford/London IF Meetup has a session on writing and narrative design for hire: we’ll be talking not just about how to get freelance writing work, but about what that work tends to involve and how to approach clients of different types.
IF Comp games are currently available to play and judge. Anyone can participate in judging — so if you want to be part of that, check out the website for instructions. The judging period runs through November 15.
Starting November 15, fos1 is hosting a jam for TADS games, which will run through early 2022. This is intended to invite more authors to try out the TADS system and put some fresh energy into that ecosystem.
Articles, Podcasts, Etc
Arcweave is a branching narrative design tool; its creators have also started a new YouTube series about interactive fiction, starting with a look at Spider & Web by Giannis G. Georgiou.
The Short Game podcast is covering some games from IF Comp 2021. At the time of this post, their Part One episode is the only one available, but more coverage of more games may be forthcoming.
Stacey Mason’s dissertation on Responsiveness in Narrative Systems is now available. (Disclosure: I was on her committee.) In the dissertation, she offers both a theoretical exploration of ideas of agency and responsiveness in interactive narrative and a discussion of the practical tooling and design she has been developing lately – and starts off with a strong argument for why this pairing of theory and practice is essential to advance the field.
Via arnicas, A Guided Journey through Non-Interactive Story Generation is a massive overview of narrative generation systems. (Also, if this type of research interests you, or you’re into related topics around text generation et al, I very much recommend arnicas’ newsletter.)
October 22 is usually the deadline for submitting spooky interactive fiction to the yearly Saugus.net Halloween contest. This contest accepts both interactive and non-interactive short fiction, and has been running continuously since 1998. It doesn’t always get IF entries, but can be a fun place to send something if you’ve got a scary story in mind.
Even if you don’t want to join us there, IF Comp games are currently available to play and judge. Anyone can participate in judging — so if you want to be part of that, check out the website for instructions. The judging period runs through November 15.
Stuart Lloyd is revitalising the tradition of the Windhammer Prize for gamebooks, with the new Lindenbaum gamebook competition. The submission window opens December 1.
Today’s question, gathered from Twitter a little while back, is this:
How do you go from the macro to the micro, i.e. from a big, broad idea for a game to the concrete instantiation of it?
A long time ago I wrote Idea to Implementation, a discussion of how to get from implementation to completed project based on a lot of amateur experience but no experience working in a studio. If I were writing this advice now, it would have a lot more to say about studio-based practices: pre-production, the stage in which you try to eliminate unknowns about your project; vertical slices, in which you build a portion of your game at full quality. On our current project at Failbetter, Mask of the Rose, our producer Stuart Young recently wrote about what pre-production means on our project.
I mentioned “Idea to Implementation” to the questioner, who replied:
I was also thinking on a more micro level: tips for coming up with specific story beats, characters, choices, puzzles, items, descriptions. Maybe the answer is just “brainstorm a lot”, or else “collaborate with someone who’s good at brainstorming”.
For me, this is about three things:
Verifying that big, broad idea
Coming up with possible smaller elements, using brainstorming and research
Assembling the ideas into a structure, verifying their quality, and identifying what’s missing
Tomorrow, October 1, IF Comp games will be available to play and judge. Anyone can participate in judging — so if you want to be part of that, check out the website for instructions. The judging period runs through November 15.
October 5 is the deadline to submit talk proposals to the GDC AI Summit in 2022. Building a talk proposal takes a little time, so if you’d like to present something there, do give yourself enough time to read through what’s required and then pull together documentation.
Roguelike Celebration runs online October 16-17, and is often a great place to pick up some talks on procedural generation of various kinds.
Also October 17, the Seattle IF Meetup will gather to play through some IF Comp games.
October 22 is usually the deadline for submitting spooky interactive fiction to the yearly Saugus.net Halloween contest. This contest accepts both interactive and non-interactive short fiction, and has been running continuously since 1998. It doesn’t always get IF entries, but can be a fun place to send something if you’ve got a scary story in mind.
September 18-19, Emperatriz Ung is running a session for the Asian-American Writers’ Workshop called Prototyping Memory, A Game Design Approach To Nonfiction, about using Inform and IF techniques to reimagine setting, perspective, and structure.
If you’d like to contribute a game, you only need to build it on the Seltani system and then leave a comment on the Meetup page to indicate that it’s been submitted for play. And if we don’t get a lot of entries (people are busy and it’s hard to tell in advance!) we’ll still meet and play through some of the existing games on the Seltani system. You’re more than welcome to come and play with us even if you don’t have time or inclination to write anything.
September 28 is the deadline to submit games to IF Comp; authors should already have signed up for this, however, so if you haven’t done so, you cannot enter now. (If you’ve missed the deadline and are sad about it, Spring Thing offers an alternate comp opportunity each year, so you may want to keep an eye out for the next time that opens for entries.)
IF Comp is also still accepting prize submissions and contributions to the Colossal Fund, which helps support authors and the IF Technology Foundation.
Roguelike Celebration runs online October 16-17, and is often a great place to pick up some talks on procedural generation of various kinds.
Also October 17, the Seattle IF Meetup will gather to play through some IF Comp games.
October 24, the London IF Meetup will do our IF Comp playthrough session.
Talks, Podcasts, and Articles
Jimmy Maher’s history of games has reached 1995, with an article on some of the grand IF written when the post-commercial amateur IF community was coming into its own. People curious about the history of IF may enjoy the read; newer fans of text adventures may also find a few recommendations for older gems they haven’t yet played.
Over the years, interactive fiction and other narrative games have been shown in a huge range of public contexts, including conference expo booths and in museums.
The Game Arts Curators Kit is a new handbook on how to approach game curation and display, bringing together input from more than two dozen people with experience in that area, and currently available in wiki form. It covers everything from curatorial selection to setting up a venue to how to communicate with the game creators about the results of the exhibition if they weren’t able to be there in person.
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Readers interested in linguistics and natural language processing might enjoy this Lingthusiasm episode about a project to build machine learning models of African languages that aren’t currently well represented in machine translation solutions.
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Conversation in Pestis Apotheca features a mechanic for listening, not just for speaking
Yanko Oliveira has written about Pestis Apotheca, a procjam game where you’re blending generated ingredients to cure the plague symptoms of generated patients.
One of several neat things the game does is feature a conversation system where you need to highlight the elements of a patient’s illness you’re planning to try to cure:
…I imagine it might be a bit like listening to a bug report: you want as much information as you can get, and you kind of automatically filter things out that you know are unrelated. This was easily represented by the mechanic of clicking certain words to highlight symptoms: unless you “actively listen” to the patient, you won’t uncover what they’re feeling.
Ord. screenshot with two options for interacting with a raccoon
Seen via John Walker (@botherer) and his review, Mujo Games’ Ord. is an IF platform (containing multiple games) in which all descriptions and actions are limited to a single word.
Ord. has been around for a few years, and now the creators have released the toolkit for other authors who want to work with the system: you can create new Ord content using Google spreadsheets.
Ord’s guide for new authors makes clear that this a basic storylet system rather than a tiny-sized Twine variant: by default, Ord is randomly picking its next events from a pool of possibilities, rather than hard-linking to followup consequences. In fact, that guide offers a pretty good explanation of some real basics of storylet design: how to separate storylets into pools or groupings; how to make new storylets available or unavailable; how to create loops or hard links to create more structured areas within the storylet slurry.
Opportunities
Six to Start’s New Adventures are audio stories players experience while they run, jog, or walk. Players hear a short scenes of audio (1–3 minutes long) interspersed with songs from the music player on their phone. Each episode of a New Adventure features 6–8 scenes, and New Adventures can be standalone episodes (e.g. “The 13th Runner”) or multi-episode arcs (e.g. “Nellie Bly”).
Six to Start is currently accepting pitches to write audio pieces — not about zombies! — for inclusion in their New Adventures series. They pay for each stage of script development, and have a mentoring program for writers who have never previously written for pay. The pitching deadline is September 26.
Somewhat alarmingly, the reward at the $5K tier is your own actual coffin, which raises a lot of question about coffin sourcing and storage.
But for those who are (very reasonably) more interested in having a paperback or hardback book sans funeral furnishings, there are a bunch of handy tiers for that as well.
Remember August, meanwhile, is a narrative game played by email or physical mail, about connecting with an old friend who has become unmoored in time.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 