Hey folks, completely new to the forum here and IF Comp! I work in games as a narrative designer / writer and making my first IF solo. Since I am solo and no budget to hire, there won’t be any music, SFX, visuals, nor fancy CSS styling (unless I have time to implement that but not a priority). I want to focus completely on the writing and story.
Would I do OK for the comp or is there some expectation for these other elements?
Planning to do the IF Comp for fun and to build my skills as a writer. Sorry if this is a dumb question!
It partially depends on the style of IF you’re writing. People tend to expect more visual flair out of Twine-like games than Inform-like games, because historically Twine has had much more potential for styling than Inform.
But also, “visual flair” in this community can be good text and background colors and a nice font. The majority of IFComp games don’t have graphics or audio; only a small fraction have both. The bar is not very high.
And there are some IF systems that give authors no styling control at all! So I wouldn’t worry too much about it. The text matters more than the presentation.
Speaking personally, I play parser games in Gargoyle if I can, which means I don’t see any fancy styling beyond the occasional bold and italics. I’m partially color blind and distinctly nearsighted, and also have a thing for good typography, so I like my huge light-on-dark text with good kerning and line spacing and ligatures and all that. Some people here play only in the terminal, or with a screen reader, so they might not even get the bold and italics!
You will either be relieved or terrified that your game will be judged on the writing, storytelling, plot, characters, puzzles, and implementation (well tested).
Sounds and images done poorly might make someone judge a game harshly, but sound and images being absent on a good text game doesn’t diminish it and perhaps makes it stand out all the better.
Looking at the top 3 games from the last couple of years:
2026 - The top 3 games all had some web styling, although The Wise-Woman’s Dog (2nd place) was also released in a Z-machine version so some people probably played it in an interpreter that presented it differently anyway. Detritus (1st place) had a (static) graphical map and TWWD had an unlockable picture of a dog wearing a hat at the very end of the game, but that’s the sum total of it for graphics.
2025 - The Bat (1st place) had some minor styling on the web version but was otherwise a vanilla Inform game. The Den (2nd place) was similar to Detritus. Forsaken Denizen (3rd place) had no styling whatsoever (although it did have a bunch of PDF “feelies” bundled with the game).
2024 - Dr Ludwig and the Devil (1st place) was a completely vanilla Inform game. LAKE Adventure (2nd place) was written in AGT and ran in a DOS emulator. I haven’t played Little Match Girl 4 (3rd place) yet as I’m still working my way through the series, but if it’s like LMG2 and LMG3 then it probably makes some use of colours and music but is otherwise text.
So in summary: if you want to write a text-only game, I don’t think you’re hurting your chances at all.
It’s worth putting some effort into a cover image (to be displayed on the game listing)? A really good blurb can make up for that (Sam Kabo Ashwell’s blurb posts like this one are a good read), but a cover image that catches the eye can help get people to play it, even if it’s just a photo or clip art with text over it.
If it’s using Twine or another choice-based engine, doing a little bit to depart from the default styling (say, setting text and background colors) can be an easily-visible indicator that it’s NOT a low-effort game (see the text styling and link styling sections of Grim Baccaris’s Twine Grimoire for instructions on that).
But those are mostly first-impression “will people be likely to try this instead of moving on to one of the other 70+ games?” things. Once they start playing it most people will judge it on the writing and narrative design.
*OVER* in the 2025 IFComp started with no cover image or blurb or length or anything (though it added them later) and had in-game styling that was pretty painful to look at and still landed above the middle in a pretty strong year.
2022’s The Princess of Vestria was an unstyled Twine game that IIRC (?) started with no cover image and a pretty generic-fantasy blurb and still took 9th place.
To add a little detail here, people seem to pre-judge the default Ink templates less than the default Twine ones, possibly because they look much slicker than default Sugarcube or Harlowe. (Should you choose to go this route I would suggest making some small changes as Ink’s default font color for both light and dark mode doesn’t meet accessibility contrast guidelines.)
There’s also a wealth of premade Twine templates out there that you can use, should you so desire! As long as you credit whoever made it you’re golden. But Josh is ultimately right that 1) bad styling is worse than no styling and 2) if your game is good it’ll shine through regardless. Make what you want and have fun with it, and people will enjoy it!
CSS is very powerful and capable. It can do a lot of fancy things! But I don’t think anyone expects that, and in some cases (liked timed text) people don’t like it. So there won’t be any pressure to include features like that. No fancy CSS required!
I think people appreciate a specifically-chosen font, font size, and color scheme, because these are accessibility concerns. Light and dark modes are also a good idea for photosensitive players.
Not everyone will notice such things, but the people who need them will.
If doing this seems daunting, there are people here who will help you. Don’t be afraid to ask!
Thank you everyone for the advice and suggestions, I really appreciate it!
I am using Ink, so thank you for the template @JoshGrams. If anyone has other templates to share, I’d love them to make this easier / help me learn better. I definitely want some non-default styling / aesthetics. And I will try to see if I can find someone willing to do a cover image for my game.