So I’m a little late to my own party, thanks to Emily’s blog post and some awesome people who’ve already made an IFDB page for it, but I’m pleased to announce my latest interactive narrative, 18 Cadence.
Some quick points:
[]It’s interactive fiction in the “that’s literally what those two words mean” sense but not the parser IF sense.[/]
[]It’s written in JavaScript/jQuery and available in web browsers or on the iPad.[/]
[](But it was originally an Inform 7 prototype, and I’m hoping to release an “archival version” for Glulx like I did with maybe make some change.)[/]
[]It has about 35,000 words of content, which is about a tenth as many as Blue Lacuna, but took me about the same amount of time to write.[/]
[](Okay, to be fair, I was only working on it on and off for most of that time. Also, I didn’t have to design and code an entire interface and environment for Blue Lacuna. Also, I wasn’t getting a PhD when I wrote Blue Lacuna. Also, historical research is hard.)[/]
[]I don’t feel like I’ve really announced something until I tell the IF community about it.[/]
[]I forgot Spring Thing was starting this week! Even more awesome things to play![/]
[]I’d love to hear what IF people make of this as an experiment in a different kind of way a textual story can be interactive.[/]
Saw this on Emily’s blog. Looks very interesting, I’ll be checking it out shortly!
First of all, congratulations on releasing a novel “game” that dillutes the barrier between author/reader even further. We’re all in favour of dilluting barriers, I’m sure. 
Now, I’m sure you’ll find this ridiculous, but here it goes: I have managed to save it as a webpage for offline vieweing. It means I can’t share stories, most likely, but I don’t intend to at this stage and if I do I know where to go, so THAT’s all right. The funny bit is, I put the webpage in my iPod and - somehow - it recognises it’s in an iOS environment and does NOT allow me to use/navigate it as it does allow for any other webpage.
Is this intentional? I know if someone accesses the website with an iSO you probably want to say “There’s a better version out there!”, but locking the browser version from any iOS? Plus, your app is iPad only, is it not? It wouldn’t work with an iPod anyway…
Hi Peter-- yeah, there’s a couple of reasons it’s not going to work well on your (I assume) iPod touch… stuff would be too small to click on, a lot of the graphics are optimized for the specific screen resolution of the iPad, etc. I’m open to eventually getting it working on an Android tablet with similar screen resolution, but it’s never going to exist on a phone-sized device. (Although if you have a local version, you can probably hack around with the “startup.js” file and see what it would look like. I expect it won’t be pretty.)
And yeah, you can’t play it in the iPad’s web browser anyway, partly for boring technical reasons but mostly because I wanted to create a “marketing” distinction between the browser-based version and the iPad version as a “premium” experience. It’s the first time I’ve tried to sell my (interactive) work so it will be interesting to see what happens.
I see. Personally I’m against developers deciding what’s best for me as the consumer and locking things out, on the basis that if I want to try it in a non-optimal way I’ll either find out it can’t be done or adjust and play it even if it is crappeier. But that’s a pet peeve, and of course, I understand that you, the author, would want to preserve a certain degree of usability.