Author’s progressing can be as fun as their games

Playing IF Reviews and Essays
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(Typing on mobile so there may be typos; if you point out any I’ll fix them)

I really like the human element in IF. If I was the last human in some distant future and had all If available to me but all authors were long gone and there was no info about them, I’d still like IF but a lot of the best parts would be gone.

I think one of my favorite things to see is authors experimenting, adapting, and growing. Laura Knauth is my favorite example. Her first game was a very ambitious fantasy game that was woefully underimplemented. Her second game was a small but very polished one room game. Her final game combined the size of the first game with the polish of the second, and won IFComp.

I love seeing people like Emily Short, Andrew Plotkin, and Hanon Ondricek (among many others) continually trying new things and new experiments, adapting to feedback and learning and trying new formats. You can point to monumental games like Counterfeit Monkey or Hadean Lands or Cannery Vale and point out the backstory that led to this point. And seeing new others who branch out and can swing between parser and choice (like Charm Cochran or Alyshkalia) is neat.

Not quite as exciting to me but interesting from a story viewpoint are people who put out very similar games for a long, long time, not really adapting or experimenting or listening to feedback. Sometimes this can be compelling (like Paul Panks’ story or Rybread Celsius) and sometimes they can be a consistent source of entertainment. I think this is most noble and fun when the person making them just doesn’t care what people think and are making what they love. I think it’s most frustrating when the authors insist that others should enjoy aspects of the game that they refuse to change.

I think one of the biggest bummers is to see capable authors who dip their toes in the water and make small nuggets of games but never jumps in. Who has great writing chops or clever puzzle ideas and makes little amuse-bouches but never completes a plot arc or makes a game with a beginning, middle and end. That’s not to say that long games are better than short, but some short games are clearly “snippets” while some even shorter games like the excellent short parser game Out has a clearly defined narrative arc.

Of course that’s just my personal taste. For others small snippets of games can be wonderful due to not having enough time to play longer. And some snippets can be great (like To Spring Open).

But watching people adapt and grow and change makes for a great story. Maybe that’s why almost all of my favorite games are by authors with long history of experimentation (like Lynnea Glasser and Hanon) and few games that came out of nowhere (like Violet).

What do you think your personal author arc has been like? Where did you start, and where are you headed? Are there any authors whose story you like?

I like Bez’s games due to the intense personal stories and the experimentation, for example. The author’s story is often the game itself!

Edit: as for myself I’m pretty sure I’m stalling for the future. I have ideas but they’re all about the same type of game, same length, same polish. But maybe new ideas will come!

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I don’t think I appreciate authors’ development as much as you. But I think my own future progress will be exciting for me.

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I’ve thought about this a bit before—the first two games I released, You’re a Time Agent! and Structural Integrity, were much more ambitious than anything I’ve made since, both in length and mechanical complexity. I burned out a bit trying to get SI done in time for Spring Thing 2023 (and a few bugs still made it into the released version—it’s a short game, but it’s quite complex under the hood!), so after that, I was ready to make some simpler things. The Neo-Interactives’ IF jams and other itch.io jams have been great both for spurring those smaller ideas and giving me a deadline so that I actually get them done.

I had intended to make a longer, more complex game for IF Comp 2024, but my life and my creative brain didn’t end up in a place where I could actually start it this year. But now I am aiming for 2025!

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I recently replayed my first game and noticed I came to it with a lot of frenetic energy. I was more abrasive, didn’t really care if audiences will get it because it’s so hyper specific and local an experience, and I just wanted to leave a huge chunk of myself on the internet in case I never made games again. I was surprised by my own writing: there are elements that shocked me and made me wonder why I put it there.

In a certain sense, I was particularly inspired by Autumn Chen’s games. I was playing through most of her games, and it was inspiring to see her build up a repertoire on clearly personal characters and themes through IF mechanics. It made me realize that I could explore some local experiences I had in a more artistic environment — the only differences between Hanna and Pageant are that I had the knowledge of the latter, and I entered the fray with a super shotgun.

But what I ultimately favor is the unpredictability and surprise of something. I am a bit toned down nowadays, and I do wonder if this is killing my creative drive. While my games often broach uncomfortable subject matter about families and trauma, it feels rather repetitive. Almost too rote. I’d like to bring back that energy into other projects, so I have a bit of interest in bringing some anthropological theory into my games as of late.

At the moment, I find the works of Adam Cadre, Chandler Groover, and Charm Cochran very interesting. While I don’t necessarily like all their works (Cadre is more a mixed bag), I admire their versatility to do different things. Cadre will always shock the player with new innovations, Groover is like a Shakespeare of body horror, and Cochran often finds new ways to explore limited agency. They’re three authors that change things up in dramatic ways, and I find it difficult to recognize trajectories for their work, despite having obviously noticeable patterns.

I find myself thinking I have a trajectory if I keep continuing, and I kinda don’t want that. I want to be as unpredictable as those three; it makes every work full of vitality, and the player has to be on their toes.

I think that’s why it is fun to explore the “progression” of authors as MathBrush puts it: there are surprises, evolutions, de-evolutions, ruptures, continuities, discontinuities, and so on that characterize the body of a work. If the oeuvre of an author is like an essay, it is sprawling and rife of contradictions. I enjoy teasing the contradictions out to see how they play with other aspects. A thesis that is too clean can be too boring and predictable. The essays that go into wild tangents are the ones that will stick with me because they are bizarre, unusual, and make you go “why”.

As Laurence Sterne once wrote in Tristram Shandy,

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;—they are the life, the soul of reading;—take them out of this book for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them;

I like the digressive aspects of writers. It makes charting their growth complicated, which is like how all humans grow. We can’t sum up a writer in a few words; we find ourselves flowing with words just to describe any writer because their lives, their works, and their histories too complicated. I want to be like that, and I still have a long way to go to reach that.

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I’m still in this stage after a year :joy: but now I’m stepping out of it, into a new style. Actually, scratch new style. This will probably be just as bad as the last.

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Yeah, I like this kind of analysis too - and it’s one that’s pretty hard to do in isolated reviews, unfortunately (anyone want to submit a career-wide discussion of an author to the Rosebush?). I also am very interested specifically by folks who do both choice and parser games, since I think that makes their approaches broadly relevant and potentially point towards where the scene as a whole might be headed (since I think the story of the last fiveish years of IF is largely about getting over choice vs parser as an unbridgeable divide).

In terms of my own trajectory, with only two real games it’s of course presumptuous to say anything, but my goals are always to have players thinking “no one but Mike Russo could have written this game” and also “I wouldn’t have predicted Mike Russo would have made that game next.”

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Boy, oh boy. Here we go. This will most likely be very long, so, I’ll divide it into phases and have it in neat little sections.

Phase 1: First IF Wave

I was a teen that just discovered interactive fiction and visual novels and decided that they should probably make something similar too. This phase is characterized by my still poor understanding of English and writing in general, and the incredibly strong feeling that all I write is good and needs no corrections. No project from this time was ever completed, but they include Hadrium (made in Quest; sci-fi story with lesbian romance) and Never Let Me Go (also Quest, meant to be a story about depression).

Phase 2: Birth of Oneiron

I got deep into the world of visual novels at that time. Someone told me that I have perfect writing for visual novels, despite me not showing ANYTHING that’d prove it. As to why would they say it then, it makes sense in the larger context that I can’t provide in public, but I digress. This phase is what brought Oneironverse into the world, but unlike the stories I write in this universe today, the worldbuilding and characterization weren’t nearly as advanced as they are today. I still thought that everything I do is gold to some extent, but I started to slowly realize that this might not be the case. Works from that time include Silver Dagger Ball (made in Quest, unfinished, an attempt at a spooky AU for Halloween), Oneiron Proto (made in Quest, an unfinished first version of what I wanted Oneiron to be) and Oneiron Chapter 1 (made in Squiffy, actually finished for once, now heavily outdated from the perspective of lore and what I want to do with the series).

Phase 3: Entering the VN scene

You must understand that, despite making only IFs at that point, I looked at IFs as of a lesser form of art, compared to visual novels. I was immature and my viewpoint came from the fact that I was in a biased environment that really liked VNs, but thought IFs are kinda lame without visuals and such, and this viewpoint poisoned me too. I was being asked if I’ll ever make an Oneiron VN because Oneiron IF was simply not enough, and it made me feel somewhat resentful towards the IF medium as a whole. Therefore, I switched up, picked up ren’py, and entered my first jam. There’s not a lot to say about this phase: I was in a new field again, surrounded by a community that was helpful and quite friendly, but I didn’t gain a lot of traction. It was very much a learning phase for ren’py usage for me. I didn’t bother with being anything else but a writer because I believed that this is the only thing I can do, even if my faith in my writing abilities has already faltered at that point. “Highlighted” works from this time include Blood in the Wine and Tourist in the Waking World.

Phase 4: VN Scene again, just more comfortable

Not a lot to say about this one. This is where I start to get really comfortable - and also, really burnt out and dead. Naturally, with time, the overall quality of my work and what not has only increased, but I didn’t really feel it. I kept pushing and pushing myself towards being better, but I only ended up wearing myself out in the process. This was also, fortunately, the time when I started to get acquainted with some people in the community, many of which I helped out or worked with. I also started experimenting with making my own sprites, backgrounds, logos and music, as to minimize the amount of recruitment to do. “Highlighted” works from that time: Let’s Get Bitter Together, Convergence, Shibboleth.

Phase 5: Experimenting and Second IF Wave

This is the phase we’re in right now, and it’s arguably the best one of them all! I realized that, if I’ll stick to telling only Oneironverse stories, I’ll simply stagnate and burn out, so I decided to open up and allow myself to tell other stories. This also meant that I had to reevaluate what I want to do and why I want to do it. I decided it’s time to step back a little and try to see what will work for me. This is also when A Certain Incident happened (if you know, you know), which prompted me to write i won’t finish this game. I labelled it as IF, since it relied purely on text, so you could say it was my first work of pure IF since Phase 2 ended. The success of i won’t finish this game convinced me that I should simply make things I want to make, no matter how weird or technically “unmarketable” they may be. This is the phase of checking out new avenues to tell my stories, the age of experimentation, the one in which I reconnect with creating, the one in which I finally feel like I found myself as a writer, in a way. I’m trying new things out, seeing what sticks and no longer caring about what’s going to be popular or proper. Paradoxically, it’s also the phase in which my efforts are recognized the most.
Also, I got to reconnect with my IF roots with no more of that stupid “IFs are inferior because no sprites” viewpoint.
“Highlighted” games: i won’t finish this game (ren’py), the Lights series (ren’py), te/ra/to/ma (Decker), and the unfinished things I have a lot of fun with: Passerine Hills (or the Golden Cage) (Twine) and Crucifixion of Verity Cadenhall (Inform 7).

Hooo boy. I yapped long enough. TLDR: from IF I have come and to IF I shall return.

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I’ve probably mentioned my personal arc a few too many times for the number of pieces I’ve made, but please indulge me again.

I entered IF Comp 2005 with a parser game, Mix Tape, and was so disappointed with my half-finished mess that I disappeared into the IF wilds (roguelike and real-time game design). 18 years later I returned with a choice-and-parser combination game, Hand Me Down, that did reasonably well at IF Comp 2023 (technically one place better, but amongst a bigger cohort).

This year I wrote a tiny comedic choice game, One True Love, that was nice. My next two games are vastly different to each other and anything I’ve done before, but both in Twine. The next two projects planned after that are parser games and will be different again.

I’d like to be in the Mike Russo school of IF Authors with a varied and interesting corpus of work. I also seem to want to push at the technical boundaries of IF. Let’s see how it goes!

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Back in middle school and high school, I spent a ton of time experimenting with Inform 7 and making lots of not-very-good experiments that nobody except my family ever saw. Eventually this culminated in Scroll Thief, which just kept getting bigger and bigger as I went “huh, you know what would be interesting to add” and added it. I never would have released it at all if not for Introcomp’s one-year deadline, and its sequel was going to be bigger yet—there was a coal mine with time travel where you had to sync up four different versions of yourself, an abandoned vaguely-Mesoamerican temple where you’d design your own maze to lure a monster away and steal its treasure, a whole area based around potions…

Eventually it collapsed under its own weight and I couldn’t bring myself to work on it any more because it was too overwhelming to think about. I experimented with some other games—one based on Suspended’s core mechanic, one with intricately detailed rules for heat transfer—but the scope creep inevitably outpaced my enthusiasm. So I never released anything except extensions and little demos for almost a decade. The release of Dialog was reviving my interest a bit, but then the pandemic happened and life got more complicated and I just didn’t have the time or energy for IF any more.

Then I saw on Tumblr that the long-awaited open-sourcing of Inform 7 had happened, and that brought me back! So I returned to the forum, spent a while catching up on what had changed, and started experimenting with the new release. There was a thread at one point asking how long it would take experienced authors to write Cloak of Darkness from scratch; I thought “hm, I’ve been using Inform for ages and am a fast typer, this sounds fun”, and finished in four minutes and sixteen seconds.

EDIT: That actually isn’t quite accurate. I found the post and it came after Enigma. Oops.

So when ECTOCOMP came around, I thought “hm, writing IF in four hours sounds like a fun way to make myself actually finish something”. The result was The Enigma of the Old Manor House, and I had a lot of fun with it; the constraints kept the scope creep in check and turned it into a puzzle to solve. Instead of Scroll Thief’s incessant “I wonder how I can implement this cool idea”, it was “I wonder what cool ideas I can implement in a short amount of time”.

That led to trying to plot out an IFComp entry—like Enigma, making a plan first instead of letting it grow organically as I went along—and Death on the Stormrider didn’t do great in the comp but got some lovely reviews so I consider it a success. And talking to my friends about it (and showing them VtM: Night Road) led to one of the players in my VtM game wanting to adapt one of our early stories into an IF, which turned into Loose Ends, and I wanted to share the fun I had in ECTOCOMP with my non-coding siblings, which turned into The Labyrinthine Library of Xleksixnrewix (salvaging tons of unused code from that temple in the Scroll Thief sequel…I’ll put the original into the next Bring Out Your Dead or whatever).

Now I seem to have sort of settled into a genre—a lot of my works are mysteries of one sort or another—and I’m working on another IFComp entry for this year, plus some more experimental works which may or may not get anywhere, and my siblings asked if we can do ECTOCOMP together again.

So I guess the moral is—finished is better than perfect! There was a (probably apocryphal) story going around recently about an art professor who did an experiment. He told one class of pottery students they’d be graded on quantity (how many pieces they finished by the end of the semester) and another class they’d be graded on quality (the single best piece they made). At the end of the semester, the best works all came from the quantity class, because they were continually trying and failing and learning from the process, while the quality class wasn’t. But that’s definitely been my experience. I’ve improved much more as a writer, designer, and coder by writing a bunch of IF than by working on a single scope-crept project forever.

The other moral is I like comps because they give me constraints and deadlines. Also, Scroll Thief (among other things) got me a job as an engineer at an escape room, so I spent a lot of those intervening years designing and implementing puzzles in real life, which didn’t hurt!

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As the saying goes, “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”. Also, the principle of “release early, release often” seems applicable here.

As for myself… I did give learning Inform a brief stab a few years ago, but never got even as far as compiling a little test project because the command line compiler was basically useless for figuring out why code wasn’t compiling and at the time, my setup made even trying the Inform IDE a non-starter. Want to give it another try, and I’ve bookmarked all of the resources I’ve come across since joining this forum, but getting from “wanting to do something” to “learning how to do something” can often be the hardest step of any endeavor.

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Beautiful thought. The journey is as important as the destination. My “evolution” as an author tends to zero. I have always been “crystallized” in my implementation (Radicofani, Eleanor [Windows executables].) I realize that my games will be played by very few people. But this does not take away from the immense joy of the creative act. Nothingness and oblivion are the only alternative. Thanks for sharing.

Ps: This year I’m no exception either :wink:

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