2026 WIPs and projects thread

Iron ChIF inspired me to do some writing again, and I just blew the dust off of a WIP that, who knows, just might be ready for IFComp six months from now! Fingers crossed! That’s right. @lpsmith and @Afterward write a game in five days, and I need five months. That’s how softcore I am.

One thing I did today: I was originally planning to have each noun react to only two commands, ‘examine’ and ‘use’. But on mature reflection, I decided that examining is boring. Bo-ring! Who wants to just be passive and examine what is going on? So I axed that verb. Now the player just types the noun and the PC does her thing.

And if you think that might give the PC a lot of room in interpreting what you might want to do with the noun… you would be right. Very right. And she will occupy absolutely all of that room.

11 Likes

I just cracked open my projects list. Organized in reverse order of last update:

Feb 25 2026 - that game about forging contracts and performing rites. I’ve got the most compiled material for this of all my works in progress, such that I already have an almost-minimum-viable version of the game working. Kind of stuck on a tricky step in the implementation, though, so progress is momentarily halted.

Nov 1 2025 - I had been working on an adaptation (?) or possibly a tribute (??) to a story I once encountered, and while it seemed like a quick little project, I was struggling to incorporate this particular extension I needed for conversation. I need to go back to Ryan’s source code library again to see how he handled it, if I can just remember which game did the thing that I’m thinking of.

Sep 13 2025 - that story about a tween girl psychic detective. I want a more comprehensive understanding of all the villains before I continue working on this, but current events are giving me too much material. This might not end up being interactive fiction when it’s finished.

Mar 12 2025 - that game that’s basically choice-driven turn-based strategy. This is the game that I needed to figure out storylets in Inform 7 for. “The Exigent Seasons” was also a prototype for one of the main systems to be used in this. I feel zero urgency to work on it because I’ve had the basic idea in my head since approximately 2008; if I’ve waited this long to make it, I can wait a little longer.

Feb 12 2025 - this high-magic fantasy whodunnit game about an “unopenable book.” I keep scavenging concepts from this for the rite game above, but despite never reaching the prototype stage, I still have a stronger sense for what this game will be when it’s finished. There’s a pretty high likelihood I go back and try to finish this after the above projects are either released or abandoned.

Aug 12 2024 - that game about a haunted drugstore. This was an idea I’d originally had back in 2004 or 2005, but I go back and forth as to whether I want to pursue it. A lot of the ideas I had in my notes seem more like an interesting implementation challenge rather than something enjoyable to encounter as a player, so maybe this just lives in my WIPs forever.

Jul 5 2024 - that StumbleUpon / webring-style browser extension. This project is still a little beyond my skill level, so I’m not eager to work on it.

Jun 20 2024 - the ADHD road trip game. I recorded something like 16 hours of audio toward the goal of accurately portraying all the music that played on three different radio stations, but that just means I have to listen to 16 hours of noisy, hard-to-understand audio files if I want to transcribe these notes. I tried using a transcription service, but they couldn’t handle how much noise is in the background, so the transcriptions were worthless. I need to either force myself to spend a couple weekends doing the transcription by hand, or (more likely) I need to give up on the idea of using those recorded notes. I still can’t yet bring myself to do either.

Jun 19 2024 - the “infohazard symbol subjects you to supernatural influence” game that’s secretly an adaptation of a game that came out in 1994. Never got very far with this, but I still like the basic concept, so I haven’t shelved it yet.

Every project after that is either completed or abandoned: levels in VRChat and Little Big Planet; a web data scraper for game console trophies and achievements; a series of nested supernatural horror games by seemingly unrelated authors; a tumblr account for exploring one-sentence-per-day longform fiction writing.

4 Likes