My friend Jenni Polodna and I have a new podcast where we play text adventures. “Parser IF”. You might enjoy it even if the phrase “parser IF” means absolutely nothing to you.
(I anticipate that new episodes will be released on a “whenever we feel like it” basis.)
Today I revamped the Interactive Fiction section, adding separate pages for each game, because it pleased me to do so. You might go ahead and check out the new format, in a spare moment.
Now, if you never saw the old version of the Interactive Fiction section, you may think that you’ve missed out on something. I assure you that you have not, but I understand your feelings regardless. Let me make it up to you by reproducing a novel I composed on my phone last Friday night:
How very nice: My game The Horrible Pyramid has won EctoComp 2013! There were 24 games entered this year, and a lot of them were really well-done and enjoyable, especially considering this is a “SpeedIF” competition and you’re supposed to write the whole game in three hours or less. (I freely admit that I took very slightly longer than three hours, but the competition organizer said it was okay.) The best place to see all the other entrants might be… here. Yeah.
I’m very proud of this game and I thought it deserved more than three hours and twenty minutes of my time, so I’ve released a revised edition that you can play in your browser. The source code is also available, if looking at that kind of thing amuses you.
Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder (working title; also, release title) was not originally intended as an Interactive Fiction Competition entry. In late 2012 and early 2013, as Emily Boegheim and I were trying to pick up steam on Robin & Orchid (working title; also, release title), I thought to myself: I just need to make a tiny game, to stretch my dang legs. After I finish a little game, I can finish this big game.
Verdeterre was not that game, but for a while I thought it was. From the beginning my goal was to make a slight game, unambitious in scope or plot or theme or mechanics, and to a certain extent I think I succeeded.
And yet here I have written many words, a lot of words, about the design of this game. You will have to scroll past them to see the high score table.
Continue readingFINISHED. Here are the results.
The winning game, Coloratura, definitely deserves its victory and its .41-point margin over the second-place game. If you haven’t played it yet you have got to get on that.
I am very proud of the second-place game, and I’m immensely grateful to Emily Boegheim for all the hard work and genius she contributed.
I’m also very glad and kind of astonished that my other game got fourth place. If you look at the statistics, Captain Verdeterre beat Tex Bonaventure by only a hundredth of a point, and Tex beat Solarium by the same tiny margin. A very serious and interesting game was edged out by two very goofy games by a very narrow margin. You ought to give Solarium a look is what I’m saying.
With 35 games in the running, one will naturally expect some games that are not that great, but a lot a lot of these games are quality pieces of work that deserve your attention. Go ahead and direct your attention to these games.
I’m planning on releasing the source code from both games I worked on, and I have some words and thoughts about Captain Verdeterre to broadcast, and maybe I could stand to pretty up this page a bit, and now this post has become a checklist purely for my own benefit. This post is OVER.
The 19th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is going on right the heck now. Go look at it. I’ve entered two games:
Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder is about pirates. The cover art above was created by Caitlyn Harris.
Robin & Orchid is about high school newspaper students who are looking for a ghost. I wrote it with Emily Boegheim.
There are a ton of other games as well. You should play as many as you want, and then you should vote in the competition before the voting period ends on November 15.
I’ve got a new text adventure for you! It’s called “Wrenlaw”.
You can play it online here. It’s a pretty tiny game, as IF goes.
I’d love to say more about it but I should probably just let you experience it for yourself!
Please click, and view a huge version
I drew this map of Koholint Island on one of those paper tableclothes at a local pizzeria last night.
Koholint is the setting of the fantastic Game Boy game The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, released in 1992. Given limited space, I had to exclude many of the details, but the eight main dungeons are there, along with Kanalet Castle, Yarna Desert, and of course Mount Tamaranch. That guy in the lower left is Link, the famous left-handed hero of Hyrule, and that vague curvy shape at the top is a seagull.
I’ve uploaded some browser-playable versions of my IF games—the ones that aren’t already hosted at PR-IF.org (since the versions there are so pretty already). Crucially, Taco Fiction didn’t have any online play available anywhere, at all, so that has been fixed.
If you haven’t had a chance before, I hope you’ll give them a shot. There’s an introduction to Interactive Fiction (c/o the authors of Inform 7) that might help you if you haven’t played this kind of game before.
And please let me know if something is screwed up!
You can play Dig My Grave or The Statue Got Me High at The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction, and while you’re there you should check out the rest of the Apollo 18+20 Tribute Album games.
The other day, prolific interactive fiction critic “Peter Pears” posted an excessively complimentary review of my IF “cover” of They Might Be Giants’s “The Statue Got Me High”. [Update, September 2014: that review is not there anymore] In the review he called out an aspect of the game that not everybody notices, namely that I stole the plot of the game from the finale of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
The rock song and the Don Juan myth both deal with statues, fire, and cosmic justice, but the similarities apparently are coincidental. A fan must have pointed them out to John Linnell after the song was released, leading him to introduce the song at a show in 1994 saying: “This song is based on the life of Don Giovanni, which I didn’t know when I wrote the song.” Yes: The game is a ripoff of two different artists’ work, and even drawing a connection between the works wasn’t my own idea. Continue reading