Tag: popular

Ultimate Quest

UltimateQuest

You’ve been kidnapped, confused, and trapped in a factory to do labor far beneath your true level. The friends you once knew think you’re dead, if they think about you at all. But you’re equipped with NV-level nanomite implants, meaning that you can disassemble and reassemble the world around you in surprising ways. It’s up to you to escape, confront the people who put you away, and complete the world-changing project you had begun.

Ultimate Quest is a new IF game — written by me, gorgeously illustrated by Silvio Aebischer — that opens today and runs in five episodes through the 22nd, as part of a new product launch by NVIDIA. The first players to complete the game will win actual prizes. If you’re reading this blog, you probably have a head start on the competition: this is classic parser IF with plenty of puzzles and exploration.

Note that this is a game with Twitter connections: you will need an account to sign in, and to tweet during play.

On Time Units and Narrative Pacing in CYOA and Parser IF

two-star says, “Well, novels are capable of conveying widely different scales of passing time. Parser IF considers time at the pace of individual actions. Choice IF can do time at different scales pretty well though.”

— from the last meeting of the IF discussion group.

This is the contention that we’re going to be discussing at our next meeting (April 5).

Continue reading “On Time Units and Narrative Pacing in CYOA and Parser IF”

What people said about the Missing Tools (and some that aren’t missing at all)

A few days ago I asked people in several forums to tell me what IF tools they wished existed. Here is a collation of the major themes. (This misses out a handful of very specific requests about what specific existing systems should do — it’s more an attempt to put together some general patterns.) I also got some interesting feedback about tools that do exist but aren’t widely known or used, so I’ve written that up too.

Continue reading “What people said about the Missing Tools (and some that aren’t missing at all)”

The Missing Tools

This Sunday (March 30, 2:15 PM) the Oxford/London IF Meetup group is having a meetup with guest presentations by Graham Nelson (Inform) and Eric Eve (TADS 3’s adv3lite library), and general discussion about what kinds of tools and toolsets we’d like to see in interactive fiction.

In prep for that, I’d like to open this question more generally: what do you wish you had an IF tool to do? What are you longing to write if only you had the right toolset to do it?

Post-Linden

As recently announced, Linden Lab is no longer supporting Versu.

What this means for me: I am no longer an employee of the Lab. At the moment I’m taking on some contract work.

What this means for the project: I am currently trying to see whether I can get back the IP for Versu and the apps that we built that Linden did not release, including Blood and Laurels. If that succeeds, I’ll post more information here. Aside from wanting to see our hard work out there, I’m concerned that people who had started working with the Versu toolset in academic environments continue to be able to use that toolset and, ideally, have a way to publish their work for others to play with. I may not be able to make that happen, but it would mean a lot to me to be able to do so.