Tag: Jeff Nyman

Links and Various Small Things

— Speaking of browser-based IF, this post has a surprisingly large collection of links to old-school games playable through a browser; a lot of it is Zplet stuff, but there’s also access to some old Scott Adams games, The Hobbit, and Oregon Trail (not strictly IF, but I have fuzzy nostalgic feelings about it all the same).

— The Guardian’s wikigame project continues apace — there’s room to contribute small amounts (even object descriptions, etc) even if you’re not interested in attempting to code or participate at a broader level.

— According to my inbox, the Australasian Interactive Entertainment conference 2008 has put out a call for papers and demonstrations. Papers are due July 18th, demonstration abstracts August 1; the conference itself will take place in Brisbane, December 3-5, 2008. They’re interested in several IF-ish topics, including “interactive digital storytelling” and (for people using IF in school projects) “e-learning and the role of games in pedagogy”. I don’t expect to be in Australia in December myself, but maybe others will want to participate. (The website seems to be a bit temperamental about coming up, but that is definitely the URL I was given.)

— Following up on Jeff Nyman’s RAIF post a few weeks ago about the lack of readily-accessible, indexed information about previous projects, I added a bunch of “making-of” article links to ifwiki’s Craft page. I probably missed lots, though. Feel free to add more. (I also keep thinking it would be great if the interpreter page were updated to reflect the existence of Flaxo, Parchment, et al., but editing access to that page seems to have been restricted due to spammers.)

— I’ve very minutely updated the I7 syntax document: it still included “inventory listing”, which has been removed from 5T18. Thanks to Sarganar for pointing out this documentation bug.

Assorted News

There is indeed an IF Art Show again this year; deadline, May 2.

Play This Thing! is reviewing Photopia (not my review, this time, but I thought people might be interested).

Jeff Nyman has another interesting post on his IF classes, this time on why his next class will be using TADS 3 rather than Inform 7.

Grandtextauto points to Hypertextopia, a program especially for the creation of “axial” hypertexts — there’s one main line of narrative to follow, with what might be considered footnotes, expansions, or embellishments. I wasn’t thrilled with the couple of examples I briefly looked at, but it represents a possibly-interesting alternative take on how hypertext design might be done.

Inform 7 for the Fiction Author

Jeff Nyman recently raised the idea of having a guide to Inform 7 specifically written for an experienced fiction author without background in IF, and I posted a brainstormed outline for such a project. The formatting was pretty ugly on Usenet, though, and I had a few ideas for revisions, so here is another, longer and better-laid-out version of the same thing, with more links to relevant games and articles.

This still isn’t nearly into the shape I would use if I were actually going to write this book — and I don’t have time to do any such thing right now anyway; I have a bunch of things to do for Inform 7, feelies.org, and the long-neglected theory book before I could take up a project of this magnitude. (And I’d like to have a little time to work on a WIP of my own — IF support work has pretty much wiped out my time for that kind of thing lately.) But possibly people will find the brainstorming interesting, even if it isn’t worked up into a complete document.

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