That’s really cool. It’s rare to find people who know about IF competitions (I get it’s a game company, it just got me thinking…)
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Even for a game company, it sounds odd for them to have been scouting competitions in this genre for talent. At least, my impression is that, even among those old enough to remember the days when this was a commercially viable genre, the mainstream view of IF is that it is a long dead genre and it’s mostly IF enthusiasts who are aware that the genre is alive and well even if it is tucked away in its own, hidden corner of the Internet… Makes one wonder if one of the higher ups at that company is a member on this very forum.
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Must have been someone who is familiar with the IF scene. But as all of us in the scene know, the folks who are into interactive fiction are all top-notch, talented, super-brains who would do well at nearly anything we tried. We’re just awesome.
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The interactive fiction apps Choices and Episode made so much money that at one point they were making $80,000 a day and were the highest grossing games on the App Store.
They use graphics and let anyone write for them but sometimes have contracts.
Anyway, a lot of bigger companies wanted to copy their success and tried to make competitor apps using professional writers. So they contacted a lot of IFcomp authors between around 2015 to 2018.
Felicity Banks mentioned making $20,000 in one year from IF; I did too, before I was divorced, from these kinds of companies. All the competitors I wrote for failed before they could be created. I remember seeing other authors they recruited (this happened to me twice), and they were almost all IFcomp people.
Since then the app and game ecosystem has evolved so that this isn’t as popular anymore. But Choices and Episode make a lot of lonely. Choice based IF with graphics is an extremely popular category of game, especially with romantic options.
Edit: while $20,000 sounds like a lot and it was at the time, it required a ton of work. It couldn’t have worked as a full time job for me, and it was extraordinarily stressful. I switched for tutoring as a side gig; it paid less but is much more consistent and less stressful.
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Maybe not, because the same thing happened to me. I was approached by a Chinese company making mobile games and they wanted someone to come up with English language titles for their games. They told me they’d approached the authors of some high-ranking IFComp games. I made a couple of hundred quid but the work dried up pretty quickly, and I wonder if that was down to the appearance of AIs. It’s the only time I’ve ever worked in the game industry and the only time I’ve ever been paid to write, albeit only snappy two-word titles.
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Yeah, I got approached by someone after the 2020 comp. I can’t remember who it was, and the offer was a little suspect, so I didn’t pursue it, but I’ll bet a lot of the 2020 entrants got something similar.
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This is exactly why I would love to see a bunch of crappy Zarfian (or Innocentian!) speed-IF. Open the floodgates.
I think of Ryan Veeder as an interesting counterexample: he has multiple acknowledged masterpieces, but those masterpieces come within an oeuvre of dozens (!) of other three-and-a-half-star “random Veederesque games you will like if you like random Veederesque games”. And people do like them. Somehow, the joy of creation has overcome self-pressure for every game to be better than the last.
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I’m calling my solicitor right now in order to change my name to Random Veederesque by deed poll.
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I’ve had two legitimate paid job offers from placing in the top ten of the IF Comp. It’s totally a thing!
EDIT: From my 2015 entry; not from my 2023 entry. So yes, it looks like it was a moment in time when people were jumping on the IF Bandwagon (and mostly falling off and getting trampled, because making money in any creative endeavour is hard).
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Haah! Thank you for throwing that awesome Galaxy Jones art at me!
I love it, and having it hurled at me unprepared makes me want to do this in random conversations.
–Nice weather today, huh?
–Why yes, clear blue skies, a bit of a breeze, and … Galaxy Jones!!!
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I notice both are rated quite highly. Volume one is on archive.org. Volume two is not. It’d be cool to see it up there, but anyone in possession of volume 2 probably has something quite valuable. Scanning stuff takes time.
I appreciate being tipped off to this!
Also it’s neat Shay Addams’s Quest for Clues IV is up there. I have spare copies of Quest for Clues I-III I bought cheap on eBay, so I might send one in to Archive.org. V is a bit trickier.
That’s something I’d like to try some day.
Which sort of ties into the original topic. I’m not traditionally successful. I think if people looked at my potential in high school and where I’m at now in my career, they might think “what a waste.” (On the other hand, if they knew about my family situation, they might be more supportive.) People assured me I was really smart and I’d go far.
I really felt awkward around that–and years later on reading Carol Dweck’s Mindset I read that parents who just tell their kids “you’re smart” don’t help as much as those who say “you can figure this out.” It felt like a success to uncover that–I’d read a lot of other books that said similar things, but it all clicked, and I felt without feeling like I was bragging that I deserved that success because I had looked and searched and read a lot. I really like those moments where something from 30 years ago makes sense, regardless of how much I leaned on the Internet for it to happen. (Usually a lot!) It feels like a big win, without feeling like I had to defeat anyone.
I like to be able to say every day, hey, I tried something I was scared to yesterday. Some days I’m even able to say that trying something new snowballed.
It’s a good feeling to say I’ve done a lot of things I wanted to, and a few I didn’t suspect I could have.
I have an ability to hit certain micro-goals consistently when I am not feeling too rotten, and I like that. I have a baseline of writing I want to do per day, and I usually hit it. I’ve kept going here longer than I thought I would, which has its upsides and downsides. Mostly upsides I think.
Yes, the whole cliche about success being a journey is … actually pretty on the mark. I hated it, but then again, I think people who spouted it at me didn’t really get it or were just pushing me away from nice small achievable successes, or they wanted to take me on THEIR success journeys.
It’s a good feeling to say you did something cool and are looking forward to something else cool, and you don’t have to evaluate if one success is bigger than the other.
I remember an adult I once thought very wise ask “Are you happy?” Looking back it was a gotcha and I remember feeling trapped.
I know good rules to make sure I don’t become too unhappy, and I know good ways to keep myself open to unexpected happy events. Replace happy with successful to get back to the initial topics.
Sometimes they go hand in hand. Like I am happy when I successfully navigate an incident from my past, where stuff that didn’t make sense or I thought I was crazy clicks, and it’s not a conspiracy theory.
E.g. person A was acting in better faith/was more supportive than I thought, person B was acting in worse faith/was more destructive, and I don’t have to feel bad I missed some clues or hints. I’ve checked my work. I didn’t need to whine at anyone, but it’ll be useful and enlightening in a future discussion.
These are all successes that last and that you can build on.
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I’ve got a physical copy, which by my metrics makes me quite successful indeed.
Edit: The key is to set your standards very low.
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Yep. I know this phenomenon. It sucks. I pretty much immediately ruined their expectations by ceasing to do any work in school.
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Similar with me. In retrospective I was very stupid to waste my talents and the school. But on the other hand I didn’t get trapped in the rat race.
That reminds me of an anecdote from John Lennon’s childhood:
The teacher asked the pupils to write down what they wanted to be later in life. And John wrote “Happy”.
Then the teacher told John “You didn’t understand the question.” which John answered with “No, you don’t understand life.”
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Very likely apocryphal, but se non è vero, è ben trovato.
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Hey, what format is that Book of Adventure Games download supposed to be in? It appears to be a gzip compressed file, and running gunzip on it seemed to work, but once uncompressed, thre’s no longer a filename extension and all I can get from opening it in a text editor is it’s something XML based.
There are several links on that page. One is labelled “PDF”. One is labelled “JP2 ZIP” – I think that’s a zip file full of images. The one labelled “FULL TEXT” is a text file processed by OCR – it doesn’t do a very good job with the maps.
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Fun, fame and fortune, oh my!
After messing around with this stuff on and off for the last couple of years, I would consider “finishing” a game to send in to IntroComp as a major success, mostly because it has been fun but also because it pushed me and my writing partner to learn a new language (Inform6 with PunyInform) and wrestle with all sorts of difficulties inherent in learning something new.
I think about success a lot: in my 20s I wanted to be a professional songwriter and mostly floundered. I did stand-up comedy in the Bay Area (mostly open mics), interned at a big recording studio, and played in a really awful surf band. I’ve had a couple songs get played once or twice on the radio, self-released a couple albums of bad electronic music in my early 20s… but I don’t really consider myself to have succeeded at any of those things.
What I have succeeded at is getting better, becoming more skillful—at programming (a hobby I’ve had since childhood), at making music, and learning how to make parser based IF games. Success for me comes down to two things: learning and making. Because those are the only things I really feel I have control over.
I used to focus on fame and fortune and I lost my love for a lot of creative arts. I stopped writing music for years because I would play songs at song screenings and have my work slammed. (A similar thing happened in creative writing workshops in college). I’m trying to get back to doing that stuff now and not worrying about success so much, just allowing myself to release work into the world and then walking away from it.
“Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.”
— Tao Te Ching
I have some small accomplishments, but they almost feel like flukes and hardly rise to the level of what most people would call “success.” I had a song featured as the weather on an episode of Welcome To Nightvale and I had a couple poems published by my college’s literary journal. I did standup at The Purple Onion (as an opener). I had a song played on Rodney On The ROQ exactly once. And that awful surf band opened for Nancy Sinatra once about 17 years ago. None of it has made me famous or brought me fortune, although I earned enough money from Bandcamp sales of the Night Vale song to pay for a large pizza.
It was delicious.
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I’ve been writing IF as a hobby since 2002, and since that time I’ve been writing regularly, sometimes with four or five different games on the go at the same time. I’ve never set myself writing goals but I’d write nearly every day.
Then last year I just hit a wall. I had a very bad year financially when my freelance work dried up (largely thanks to Liz Truss’s micro-budget) and I suddenly had a lot of spare time. So over the summer I threw myself into completing To Sea in a Sieve in time for last year’s competition. I had a lot of last minute problems with bugs. I managed to fix them, but the effort broke me. I haven’t opened Inform 7 since the competition closed in October. I went from writing practically every day to not writing at all.
My focus has shifted to doing things that will make me money, particularly through passive income streams. I don’t make any money from IF so that’s been put on the back burner. I haven’t yet made any money yet from my passive income streams but that’s by the way.
I hope someday soon to feel secure enough to get back to writing IF, and perhaps even put out that post-comp release of To Sea in a Sieve, though I still feel somewhat sour towards Inform 7. I’m still hoping to make something else cool, but after 20 years perhaps a fallow period is what I need.
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Very likely apocryphal , but se non è vero, è ben trovato.
The teacher asked the pupils to write down what they wanted to be later in life. And John Lennon wrote “Happy”.
Then the teacher told John “You didn’t understand the question.” which John answered with “No, you don’t understand life.”
The teacher retorted: “Don’t be such a moody teenager. Peppy boy band The Beatles is in town. Go see them.”
“But teacher, I am a Beatle.”
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