A note to everyone participating this year who will be using Inform 7: I put together an extension that automatically adds a >VERBS command covering all legal verbs in your game, which might be useful for a game geared toward beginnners. It’s being distributed by PM as a beta now, but it seems to be working well. Details at Automated >VERBS command (plus explanation of allowed usages of verbs).
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I have always placed list of verbs in games for Literacy Jam in the HELP command. 
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Submissions for Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2026 are now open. 87 people have joined. It was a little higher, but one or two pulled out after the automated itch email reminder that the comp had started. This is a record, as far as I can tell, and we still have two months until submissions close.
The vast majority of those that have joined are not in this community and have never written a text adventure before, so probably won’t submit anything. Even so, if we get a 10% submission rate, that’s 8 or so games, which is a healthy number for such a specialised competition. Let’s see if we can break the record of 15 entries set in the second competition in 2022.
Submissions close on 30 April 2026. Don’t forget!
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And it’s done! I’ll polish my writeup at some point and post it once the TALJ games launch. “How to write a text adventure in a week”!
It’s pretty small, as one might expect for a game written in one week, but has a full tutorial, anti-softlock features, various bits of user-friendliness, and (most importantly) five complete non-tutorial puzzles.
(And I’ll also test it before submission, of course. It’s how to write a text adventure in a week, not how to polish one, after all! But it was a fun little challenge.)
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Plus, I got to use the word “Antediluvian” in a game title!
(It means before (ante) the Great Flood from the Bible (diluvium).)
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Great! I look forward to giving this a try when it launches. And thanks for clearing up my misapprehension over what antediluvian means (it’s been coming up a lot in a book I’m reading and I was thinking it meant “from under the ocean” or something). Sometimes I just kinda assume I know what a word means when I don’t 
.
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