Spring Thing is an annual festival celebrating new text-based computer games of all kinds. Originally founded as an off-season counterweight to IF Comp in the fall, the current incarnation of the Thing is a less competitive space with looser restrictions. Without the two-hour judging limit of IF Comp, for instance, longer games are welcomed (though shorter games are fine, too!) There’s no fee to enter, but you do have to submit an “intent to enter” in advance. And there are prizes!
Games must be debuts and in a well-polished state (bug tested, etc.)
You must submit an intent to enter by March 1st, 2026, and your game itself by April 4th.
Your game must be free to play, and will be archived on the Spring Thing site after the festival closes, although:
You can submit to the “Back Garden” to showcase a demo of a game you’re planning to sell, or a polished excerpt of something unfinished, or a game that cannot be archived.
You can submit revisions of previously released games to the “New Game Plus” section. Revisions need to be substantial, such as porting a game to a dramatically different system or adding substantial new graphics or new content.
Your game should not use AI-generated text or multimedia. Translations using AI may possibly be accepted on a case-by-case basis. Games whose text is similar to AI-generated text may be rejected on a case-by-case basis.
Entrants to the Main Festival can be nominated for one of two “Best In Show” ribbons, and all entries are eligible for custom “Audience Awards.” Prize donors also gift fun, unique prizes , which Main Festival entrants have a chance to receive.
The festival is always looking for prize donors . If you have a cool idea for a prize that fellow IF authors might enjoy, let me know!
Check out the site for more info, and I’m happy to answer any questions here or sent to brian at springthing.net . Thanks, and happy writing,
The festival additionally asks that authors in the main competition or the new game plus competition submit only one game per festival year, that Back Garden entrants submit no more than three games per festival
This is slightly ambiguous. Does this mean that an author in the main competition is limited to one game total, or can they submit up to three more games in the Back Garden in addition to their one main game?
That case has never come up, but I’d like the grand total over all divisions to be 3 or less with no more than 1 in the main festival. The rule used to be only 1 no matter what, but a few people wanted to do enter multiple small games into the back garden so we allowed that in.
That clause is there specifically because some people have said that their game only used AI for translation but it is clear that they actually used it to write the game as well; so basically using AI for translation is always okay, but only if that’s the only place it was used, not for writing the game itself. Some people have tried to use translation as a ‘free pass’ to put as much Ai as they want into a game, so that’s where the case-by-case basis comes in.
(I know people are probably thinking, ‘but what if you can’t tell they used AI to write it?’ If someone is good enough at hiding AI use that no one can notice and the game is good, then that’s not the kind of stuff I’m worried about banning from Spring Thing. The no-AI rule is there because of the super-low-effort stuff that is long and rambling and incoherent and under-implemented).
It might be helpful if the rules clearly stated that there are no restrictions on genuine, pure translations, but that restrictions apply when AI is used as a backdoor to generate text.
Senica Thing as an informal prequel to Spring Thing is curently gathering students´ entries from Slovakia, Slovenia and this year possibly also from Romania for the Back Garden. My plan is to test them all and pass on to Spring Thing a maximum of 8 most worthy games. In case anybody from Spring Thing team liked to double check and make sure that I am not putting a stopper to an obvious gem, I will gladly and heartily welcome a second skilled tester . Our internal deadline is 20 March and our this year´s topics are two to chose from:
a “Swarm” and “Medievals”
both topics should exploit the trope of societies, fellowships, colonies, teams or a bigger number of the same thing.
With apologies if this is opening a can of worms (and feel free to delete/split this question if it’s too off topic), but:
What about using AI for testing a game?
In the interest of full disclosure for me this is a purely hypothetical question, because my WIP isn’t anywhere near ready for release. And I’m not sure if I’m going to go for release-via-comp when it is (it’s a big, sprawling thing and so I think less suitable for consideration in competitions). But I’m interested in taking the community pulse on the subject.
As organizer I’m not really interested in enforcing such a rule. There are a lot of reasons to dislike AI (copyright, electricity use, etc.) but the AI problems that prompted the rule change were about 11-12 very long, tedious, repetitive AI-written games that were unpleasant to experience, with confusing/unhelpful images that bloated file size.
AI testing shouldn’t cause either of those problems directly and I would have no way of telling if people did it.
And I personally can’t really discriminate here because my personal use case for AI is copying error codes from applications and pasting them into AI. It’s not always helpful since it hallucinates pretty often but I’ve had a couple of positive experiences with it (I guess my only positive experiences, really).
Intents to enter have closed! Emails should have gone out to all those registered. If you did not receive an email, please let me know. Please take note of the rule added this year that generative AI images and text are not allowed, nor AI live service. Looking forward to a wonderful set of games!
. Our internal deadline is 20 March and our this year´s topics are two to chose from: