Inform – Page 2 – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

IF Comp 2015 Guest Post: Duncan Stevens on Map

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.

Here Duncan Stevens, one of the prolific reviewers of IF in the late-90s newsgroups, takes a look at Map.

Continue reading “IF Comp 2015 Guest Post: Duncan Stevens on Map”

IF Comp 2015 Guest Post: Brendan Desilets on Untold Riches

In this post, Brendan Desilets, a middle school teacher with extensive experience teaching using IF, kindly covers Jason Ermer’s IF Comp game Untold Riches, which was designed for classroom use. (Here’s Brendan’s website on IF in education, which I recommend to anyone with a broader interest in the subject.)

These previous reviews are also part of this project:

Kane County, reviewed by gamebook author S.A.
Grandma Bethlinda’s Variety Box, reviewed by Justin DeVesine

Continue reading “IF Comp 2015 Guest Post: Brendan Desilets on Untold Riches”

IF Comp 2015: The Baker of Shireton (Hanon Ondricek)

The 21st annual Interactive Fiction Competition is currently on, through mid-November. Voting is open to the general public; the only prerequisite is that you not be an author, not vote on games that you tested, and submit votes on at least five games. (You emphatically do not have to have played them all! In a year with 55 entrants, it is very unlikely that most judges will get through anywhere near all of them.)

If you are looking for other reviews, this ifwiki page contains a list of places currently carrying them.

The Baker of Shireton is a parser simulation game satirizing MMOs; it includes a large number of independently acting NPCs and different events to coordinate. Even though I did glance at the walkthrough, there was so much going on that I did not master the game in the play time allotted for competition play.

Continue reading “IF Comp 2015: The Baker of Shireton (Hanon Ondricek)”

IF Comp 2015: The Problems Compound (Andrew Schultz)

If you are looking for other reviews, this ifwiki page contains a list of places currently carrying them.

If you’ve been following recent parser IF, the title and author name are probably a strong hint about how you’ll feel about this game. Andrew Schultz has written a whole series of games riffing on different wordplay ideas, set in surreal environments in which object and character interactions don’t always make logical sense as long as they conform to the linguistic game currently at work.

The Problems Compound actually slightly deviates from that expectation — though all the characters and situations are based on one inverted idiom or another, the actual gameplay is a bit more standard parser puzzle stuff involving manipulating objects. But the writing style, setting, sense of humor, and overall difficulty are all about where you might expect based on the author’s past work. The game is fairly sizable, and even though I sometimes resorted to the included walkthrough chart, I eventually ran out of time before finishing. This is also a somewhat unconventional review for me, and more than usually based on running notes rather than a considered retrospective after play. The reasons for that will become clear at the end.

Continue reading “IF Comp 2015: The Problems Compound (Andrew Schultz)”

IF Comp 2015: Midnight. Swordfight. (Chandler Groover)

If you are looking for other reviews, this ifwiki page contains a list of places currently carrying them.

Midnight. Swordfight. is a parser game with an experimental world model, many possible outcomes, some puzzly aspects that nonetheless don’t make the game too horribly hard, and really delicious writing. It is the work of Chandler Groover, who has been prolific this year, with Toby’s Nose and Down, the Serpent and Sun and another game in this very competition, not to mention Tailypo in the October lineup of Sub-Q magazine. It took me only about 15-20 minutes to reach one possible outcome for the game, but I didn’t want to stop at that point, and played to others, for a total of about an hour and a half of play time. It is aggressively non-linear.

Note that despite its playfulness, low-difficulty design, and use of animal costumes, this game is not what is generally meant by “suitable for children”. Indeed, it is graphic in ways that some adults may find not their thing. I didn’t feel that these were gratuitous in context, and I wasn’t offended by them; but since I’m about to praise this game and encourage willing folks to play it, I feel like I should hang a bit of a warning up first. Regard the references to sex and violence in the blurb as R/NC-17 level content warnings, not PG-13.

Continue reading “IF Comp 2015: Midnight. Swordfight. (Chandler Groover)”

Inform 5U92

…is now out. To people who were not waiting for bugs to be fixed, this may seem like a pretty low-key build: a huge amount of work went into it, but much of that work had to do with improving internal code in preparation for an eventual release of the Inform source, rather than with producing new features. Assorted things are now more cleanly implemented and a better foundation for future improvements, but that doesn’t make for glamor in the change log.

However, of possible note to readers here: the latest build does (as I mentioned in an earlier post) allow for scenes to be given properties, which means that it is now possible to make rules about what is allowed to happen during a type of scene — as in

Instead of going somewhere during a restrictive scene: …

We do not yet have the ability to write generic rules about when types of scene begin and end, which I would also like; but this may improve matters somewhat for heavy users of Inform scenes.

In other news, it is now possible to define new directions freely — something that we felt was an omission from the outset, so I am glad that is checked off the list.