We are pleased to announce the recipients of the second round of IFTF microgrants, after a successful pilot in 2024. The grants program exists to disburse small-value grants to peer-reviewed projects that benefit a community of interactive fiction makers, players, researchers, or educators. An independent committee of Grant Advisors review each submission and provide recommendations for funding to the Grants Committee, who this year have selected four projects to fund.
We saw great diversity again this year in the projects submitted, including a higher number of submissions compared to our pilot year. Thanks to everyone who submitted proposals! Here are the list of grant recipients for 2025.
Critical Essays On Interactive Fiction - Grace Benfell
Grace is a co-editor of The Imaginary Engine Review, an online games criticism journal. Grace will receive $500 to commission three articles for the journal on significant interactive fictions written in the 2010s, exploring how these works continue the medium’s tradition of experimentation and introducing modern IF to a broader gaming audience.
No-code IF platform for web using Ink - Mark Davis
Mark is developing a web-based tool for interactive fiction builders that allows creators without coding experience to create interactive stories incorporating images and animations, using Ink scripts under the hood. Mark will receive $600 for hosting and branding assets for the in-development platform, crucial steps towards opening it up to outside testers on its road to launch.
Interactive Fiction Workshop for London Games Week - Katy Naylor
Katy will receive $716 to host a series of IF writing workshops and Twine mini-jams at the 2025 London Games Festival Fringe, and present resultant works online in a special edition of voidspace zine. The workshops are aimed at people interested in games or interactive writing but who have not coded or designed a piece of IF before, hoping to bring new voices into the community.
Atrament, an Ink-based IF engine - Serhii
Serhii is working on an IF engine that combines Ink scripting with Javascript as an alternative to Inky, creating a more full-featured release platform for Ink stories comparable to the mature web deployments for languages like Twine and ChoiceScript. The core of the engine is already complete: Serhii will receive $1000 to fund dev time writing documentation, testing and debugging the engine, and adding improvements focused on easier development and deployment workflows for authors.
We’re thrilled to see so much passion for expanding the audience of IF writers and readers in this year’s awardees. We want to thank all applicants, as well as our Grant Advisors, who volunteered their time to review the projects and formulate a recommendation for IFTF: thank you very much to Grim Baccaris, Kate Compton, Emilia Lazer-Walker, Juhana Leinonen, Colin Post, and Kaitlin Tremblay.
We would also like to thank an anonymous angel donor, whose donation provided most of the funding for this year. If you like the grants program and want to continue seeing IFTF support creators putting together cool IF projects, please donate to IFTF today! For instance, the Paypal form on our Donations page allows you to select “Grants” as the purpose for your donation. Thank you in advance to those who are able to donate to the program!
Congrats again to this year’s grant recipients! Check back in the fall for information about next year’s grant cycle. An archived announcement of the 2024 grant recipients (the first year of the program) is also available.
– IFTF Grant Admin Committee