Tag: cover art

Several Small Things

  1. This was effectively true some time ago, but the IF Cover Art Drive is officially finished and closed and over now, in the sense that I have taken down the flickr page. In the unlikely event that anyone reading this (a) got my email about their cover art and (b) really wanted to answer and accept it but (c) has been trapped under a big log for the last five months, you can email me — I still have a copy of the submitted art on my hard drive. But I’m assuming we’re done now.
  2. We draw near to the opening of IF Comp 2008! Now is a good time to donate prizes. (No, I’m not entering this year myself. I just thought I’d mention it, because a couple of people have floated interesting prize ideas in my hearing in the past few months but, er, I’ve forgotten who some of you were. So: generic reminder.)I am donating a copy of Second Person, which has great and provocative stuff to read by Jeremy Douglass, Nick Montfort, G. Kevin Wilson, Steve Meretzky, Chris Crawford, the authors of Facade, and others.

Frotz in the iPhone App store

After all the various discussion of whether Apple would or would not allow it: it’s there. Craig Smith has a free-download version of Frotz available, which comes preloaded with a bunch of games (9:05, An Act of Murder, All Roads, Anchorhead, Balances, Being Andrew Plotkin, Bronze, A Change in the Weather, Child’s Play, Christminster, Curses!, Dreamhold, For a Change, Heroes, Jigsaw, Lost Pig, The Meteor, the Stone, and A Long Glass of Sherbet, The Act of Misdirection, Photopia, Slouching Towards Bedlam, Spider and Web, Varicella, Vespers, The Weapon, and Zork (MIT version)).

It also has a button that taps straight into IFDB, and downloading a new game adds it and its cover art to your game collection.

Plays a little slowly with Bronze, but faster than the reports I’ve heard of the game on other PDAs (and Bronze does whacking lots of pathfinding all the time). Older I6 games are faster.

IF cover art looks really nice on the iPhone screen, too.

On the IF Cover Art Drive, for Future Reference

…and we’re done! I’ll be contacting authors by email over the next week or so (I have a bunch of addresses I need to look up first), and obtain permission for as many of the submissions as possible. If you’re an author who has yet to respond to a piece, feel free to drop me a line ahead of then, though.

I am thrilled with both the quantity and quality of the submissions, and I want to thank everyone who pitched in: between you, you made sure that art was offered for every single game on our request list and that we ended up with well over 100 games accounted for. For context, when this started, there were at my estimate around 130 games on IFDB with cover art of any kind; scrounging around for commercial covers and posting art from people’s private websites, etc., boosted that to around 240; and now we’re at nearly 300, with a number of covers still to be added if the authors approve them. Admittedly, that still leaves a huge majority of IFDB un-covered — over 3000 games are listed — but I think there’s now enough there to make the site on the whole feel a bit less spartan.

I don’t know that I’ll do this again — it was loads of fun, but I don’t want to promise to make it a yearly event or something. So I wanted to write a few notes in case anyone else wants to do another one later. (There are a bunch of bits where I say “…and this would save the organizer time” — this isn’t meant as a complaint, but I suspect it would be worth streamlining the process if it were going to be a repeat event.)

Details follow the cut.

Continue reading “On the IF Cover Art Drive, for Future Reference”

Cover Art Drive — Deadline Approacheth!

We are nearing the end of April, and thus the end of the IF Cover Art Drive. At the moment, we have some 79 entries on the Flickr site. (For a while I thought we might even hit a hundred, but that seems less likely now. Still, if you’d like to make a last minute push, I promise to… uh… be very impressed. Oh, I’d be hopeless in a Telethon, wouldn’t I?)

[Edit: The list of requested covers is complete! Thanks so much to everyone who made this possible. The drive doesn’t close until Wednesday, though, so if there’s still something from IFDB that doesn’t have a cover and that you’d like to contribute for, go ahead and send it my way!]