I’ve been lurking and watching what get’s mentioned to see what I could get into. But it seems to me there’s no finding anything good outside competitions and discussions.
I’d be down for most of these games to make it to steam even if I had to pay for them, where they might get more exposure. Or am I delusional?
Please let me know what you think to see where I can improve my understanding of the state of IF.
Yeah, competitions are one of the big ways that the community surfaces interesting games. Both Spring Thing and IFComp archive their results, or you could look at the Spring Thing Game or IFComp Game tags on IFDB.
Are there specific ways that you think Steam’s search/visibility features would work better for you than those of the IFDB? Not that I think the IFDB is perfect, but I find Steam’s search to be pretty terrible so I’m curious.
You might also look at other community visibility efforts like the Short Games Showcase or the results of 2023’s IF Top 50 poll…
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I thought steam could work, I’ve found games there plenty. Here I’m bored of scrolling through every year’s winners. You’re right tags help in the forums but I end up just reading the comments rather than jumping in for myself. Not that bad though.
Do you think a search filter function for the database could work?
Steam is probably a no-go for cost and copyright issues – individual authors aren’t going to spend $100 US per game to put their free hobby projects on there, and if someone wanted to put a bunch of games on there as an anthology they’d have to contact all the individual authors to get permission which could be a lot of work if you’re doing more than a few games…
What sort of search filters are you thinking of that IFDB doesn’t already have? You can search, it has user-created tags, lists, polls… so you could look at games tagged heist or cephalopod, see thecanvasrose’s favorite horror games or Tabitha’s favorite surreal games or check out any of Mathbrush’s 28 lists on various topics, etc.
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Itch is a better comparison. Do you find Itch’s search features to be good / useful / satisfying?
(Unlike Steam, Itch openly welcomes free hobby projects. There’s a lot of Twine and other IF-ish games up there.)
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One element of this is the niche of artisans who make our weird brand of fiction isn’t large. Depending on the type of IF you’re looking for, parser fiction is basically us - I don’t know what other community caters to the Infocom/Inform style implementing except for an occasional wild Bob Bates entering the chat.
There is quite a lot of choice fiction which starts blending into the graphical adventure realm, and if it’s monetized, it’s often genre focused. Steam doesn’t do a lot of IF unless it’s well built-out like Inkle does with 80 Days and device-friendliness.
Most of the art-show IF is going to be presented in a competition format. Releasing in IFComp means it must be a non-monetized work.
I enjoy itch.io for search and recommendation. One of their top-level drop down keywords is interactive-fiction. (Be aware many IFs are age-gated based on your itch settings - if you’re opted-in you’ll get a lot of erotica.) Also be aware the concept of “interactive fiction” on itch is quite broad since there is not the same barrier to entry that exists on Steam.
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Those are powerful lists. I didnt get to know those until now.
Omg you’re right about the steam fee. But could be justified sometimes.
Nice talking to you. Can I ask you something? Do you think IF has mass appeal advantage as a storytelling medium with a twist? Like if it were overly light on the user like watching a movie, maybe on the phone? I get stuck on the computer too much already. I’m just tryin to get to know it better.
I guess it is very niche. But those hyper stylized entries don’t seem too complex to pump out. Not much opportunity to profit yet. Also I’ve been on itch and liked finding stuff there. It’s just the genre isn’t for me
@Eilful are there video games, books, etc. that you’ve enjoyed? The best way to get game recommendations is word-of-mouth, and there’s 40+ years of quality IF. For instance, the games for beginners poll on IFDB is crowd-sourced (and anyone can add to it at any point).
IF already had its coming and going as the first phase of video games, and it’s unlikely to gain mass appeal considering that the video game industry has long moved on from it. It still has its community, sure, but I doubt it’s going to be much larger.
Most people aren’t in this to profit off of their games. A few come to mind (Choice of Games, Hadean Lands) but the majority of IF is free to play.
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Yeah, it’s not the most obvious thing in the world for a newcomer to find, but IFDB is hard to beat, and Mathbrush’s lists would be the first thing I’d point people toward. One can also search IFDB for lists, e.g., lists for “beginner”.
One can also search for tags, e.g., tags containing “xyzzy” to see tags related to the XYZZY Awards, like
One can likewise look at IF Comp Winners or Golden Banana of Discord winners.
In the IF Reviews and Essays category here, @mathbrush (that guy again) has produced some fantastic overviews:
- the Author Highlights series has overviews of the oeuvres of some of IF’s most notable authors
- the History of IF Comp series doesn’t just discuss each IF Comp: it provides context regarding what else was going on in the IF world that year and mentions other prominent games released in the year.
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@zarf I have a minor challenge for you. Visit itch and try to use its search / tag functions to make Hadean Lands appear on the screen amongst search results. You can do absolutely anything within the page except type ‘hadean’ or ‘lands’. If you succeed and the method is readily practical, let me know! If you don’t, I think it demonstrates that your game cannot be randomly discovered on itch. Mine is in the same position.
-Wade
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I tried to get Never Gives Up Her Dead to appear by typing “text adventure space inform” (just as a first guess). It didn’t come up, but on the third row I did find one intfiction member’s game (@PatientRock):
I wonder what his trick is?
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I think itch is tracking a lot of stuff. Newness, sales, plays, views, etc. I don’t know if they have a behind-the-scenes ‘hype’ kind of tracking. For instance, have you ever been on their front page? But rolled altogether, it adds up to projects with small audiences being not randomly discoverable. By sheer dint of numbers, it’s hard for anything to be randomly discoverable there except the most popular and the most new. Accepting that, I guess the aggravating part is how you cannot shove aside the new and popular to reach rarer things that match your specific search terms.
In related news, I’d like to congratulate @rileypb on being the second result for the search Adventure - Interactive Fiction - Sci-fi - Singleplayer - Text based with BOSH.
-Wade
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I noticed NGUHD is still marked as “in development” rather than “released”—I’m not sure if that impacts the likelihood of it showing up in search results or not, though.
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An impressive feat!
I assume you achieved this with some kind of independent thought by entering ‘tag:parser’?
Parser is not offered in either of the drop down lists of tags, and they are many screens long. I also searched all 15 screens of (randomly ordered?! why?!) ‘all tags’ for the word ‘parser’, and it’s not there. This strongly conveys to the world it’s not a tag.
So I feel better than I can bring up relevant games for the us-type-of-IFFY-people if I’m there to tell them about it.
I’ll just check you didn’t find ‘parser’ pre-offered somewhere? If you didn’t, I think I will write itch. They can’t have an ‘all tags’ section that doesn’t have all tags.
-Wade
Ah, yeah, I’ve discovered that you can search for tags that don’t show up in the dropdown menu by just typing in that tag. But the “select a tag” message in the search box really does obfuscate that.
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I’m famous!
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Oh, I never do searches on Itch.
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I don’t get it. I just went to itch, searched for “hadean lands” and it appeared in the drop-down list under GAMES & PROJECTS. Click that and it opens the project page. What could be easier?
If instead you click Search results for ‘hadean lands’, you get all games with ‘hadean’ or ‘lands’, but Hadean Lands is the first one listed, as it’s an exact match.
Alternatively, enclose “hadean lands” in double quotes and it’s the only game listed.