IF Comp 2015 Guest Post: Lucian Smith on Ether

This post is part of an ongoing project to bring more voices to the IF Comp conversation. I have been reaching out to players and authors who aren’t part of the intfiction community, and also to some veteran intfiction denizens who might not have time to cover the whole comp but who are likely to have especially useful feedback in particular areas.

Lucian Smith — now becoming a bit of a veteran of the guest post format — writes here about Ether by Mathbrush.

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Stephen Granade on Life on Mars?

cover-finalAs part of the IF Comp review collective project, I asked Stephen Granade — scientist and science educator, author of space escape game Fragile Shells, and former IF Comp organizer — to look at Life on Mars?. He came through in style with a Twine review that demonstrates his feedback interactively.

Attack of the Clockwork Army (Felicity Banks)

Attack of the Clockwork Army is a new Hosted Game at Choice of Games. It’s a steampunk Australian story by the same author who wrote IF Comp‘s Scarlet Sails and one of this year’s Windhammer Prize entrants, After the Flag Fell. And before I get any further at all, we need some disclosures.

Disclosures: Attack of the Clockwork Army is a hosted game released by Choice of Games, with whom I also have a contract. Moreover, I received a free copy of this game for the purpose of writing about it.

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IF Comp 2015 Guest Post: Harry Giles on Cape

Cover of capeThis post is part of an ongoing project to bring more voices to the IF Comp conversation. I have been reaching out to players and authors who aren’t part of the intfiction community, and also to some veteran intfiction denizens who might not have time to cover the whole comp but who are likely to have especially useful feedback in particular areas.

Harry Giles, creator of (among other things) Raik and the spoken word performance Drone, has written here about Bruno Dias’ Cape.

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Alicewinks and “Don’t Find Me, I’m Not Yours” (David Neal et al)

(Disclosure: the following review is the part of the IF Comp review trades. David Neal requested that I check out his work. I played a copy of Alicewinks that I bought with my own money; other work reviewed is available for free on David’s website.)

Screen Shot 2015-11-05 at 2.40.24 AMAlicewinks is an ebook version of Alice in Wonderland, read aloud and fully animated. The interactivity mostly focuses on mode of consumption: you can choose to read the text, flip through illustrations, or view the animations with audio — the latter option basically being a chaptered movie. The reading is pleasant to listen to, if a little less polished than some audio book performances.

The animations are made from illustrations out of many different editions of the book stitched together. The effect is a bit dizzying. Now Alice looks like a fairly young girl, and now she looks nearly grown; now she’s blonde, now brunette. Similar changes happen to the white rabbit. Sometimes the characters are made to walk or hop through a perfunctory animation of their limbs, not far off the style of Monty Python animations. Sometimes they’re squeezed or stretched to match up with elements from other illustrations. Sometimes they’re placed against backgrounds that have been upscaled or blurred to give them room for movement.

Though the individual contributing illustrations are often very beautiful, therefore, the juxtaposition and forcible animation of those illustrations is often unattractive or (at best) a bit hallucinatory. Given that it’s Alice in Wonderland, that’s not completely inappropriate.

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IF Comp 2015 Guest Post: Lucian Smith on Darkiss

darkiss1This post is part of an ongoing project to bring more voices to the IF Comp conversation. I have been reaching out to players and authors who aren’t part of the intfiction community, and also to some veteran intfiction denizens who might not have time to cover the whole comp but who are likely to have especially useful feedback in particular areas.

This time, Lucian Smith talks about his take on the Italian vampire puzzler Darkiss.

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