There’s a new episode of that text adventure podcast up now. In it, Jenni and Emily begin playing my game Taco Fiction, which you can play online here if you so choose.
The episode where Jenni and Emily finish playing Taco Fiction should follow shortly. I hope.
A Twitter Novel. By Ryan Veeder. Copyright Ryan Veeder MMXIV.
☽☽☽
Piol of Gich wiped the blood from her pearly sword and sighed.
“I still have so many enemies left,” she wept, “no matter how many I kill.”
Piv, the first moon of Gich, floated overhead. It was yellow-green.
Piol uttered an ancient Gichian curse over the corpses of the Fik-folk she had defeated. Then she looked in their wallets.
“Hmm,” she said.
According to their orbiter tickets, these Fik-folk were en route to Hed, the second moon of Gich.
“You won’t be needing these,” said Piol.
“I’ll use these to fly myself to Hed, where I can kill even more of those Fik-folk,” she said aloud.
“You won’t,” said a voice behind her.
Piol turned around to see Detective Ff.
“I have a warrant for your arrest,” Ff intoned. “You are wanted for 1,213 homicides.”
Piol spat.
“I am authorized to use deadly force should you resist,” warned Ff.
“You can certainly try your best…” Piol smirked, drawing her sword.
Detective Ff, recognizing the weapon, deployed its multimissiles. Piol exploded, her pearly sword shattered to microscopic bits.
“I’m only a police robot,” Ff thought to itself, “so I can never know love. But if I could, what I would love most is blowing up murderers.”
On the horizon, a violet ghost slowly ascended—Fewkalek, the third moon of Gich. Detective Ff collapsed into space and disappeared.
THE END
☾☾☾
There is a new episode of a podcast over at the home of the podcast. Jenni and I played It by Emily Boegheim.
The next episode of the podcast will appear in less than two months.
The new StoryBundle features a selection of books about video games that will interest you, as well as a sub-bundle of text adventures I wrote! The Gothic Tower & Assorted Interactive Fiction includes a few games you can play over here at this website, but critically it includes The Ascent of the Gothic Tower, which was commissioned by Simon Carless specifically for this StoryBundle.
One of the other games, titled So, You’ve Never Played a Text Adventure Before, Huh?, was first released in this bundle but is available for free as well. You can play it online even. I recommend it to anyone who has never played a text adventure before.
The bundle also also includes the ebook of “MOTORCYCLUS” and Other Extremely Scary Stories”! Functionally what is going on here is you can pay any amount you wish—the minimum of three dollars, if you want—for my book of scary stories.
Oh. Oh, no. What have I done?
I don’t even know where to start!
When Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder took fourth place in IF Comp 2013, I was lucky enough to pick the prize I had been eyeing for the duration of the judging period: a translation of the game into French, donated by Hugo Labrande.
Well, just in time for my birthday, Hugo has finished the translation, and now Le butin du Capitaine Verdeterre is available for your francophone enjoyment! I’m freaking out over here!
At my request, Hugo also translated all of my comments in the source code, and included comments in English on the translation: There are puns that don’t make any sense in French, puns that make more sense in French, all kinds of stuff. In the first section there’s a long series of words I wrote (in English) about my decision not to fix a bunch of bugs. You should be checking it out right now.
Thank you so much, Hugo!!!
A second episode of Clash of the Type-Ins is live. That is all.
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.
Instead of adding it to the increasingly difficult to navigate Plush Toys page, I’ll just let you know right here about this felt cockatrice I made. It’s built on the same “skeleton” as that California Condor, but it’s quite a bit smaller, and it has a pointed tail. Hopefully I’ll get some better photos together in the near future.
Yeah these pictures are not doing it justice at all.