ECTOCOMP 2022 is here. Prepare your expedition today!

Just don’t cross the Grand Guignol and Petite Mort streams.

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Exciting! Thanks for running it as always, and I love the itchio page this year :heart_eyes:

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As luck would have it, a bolt of inspiration struck me on my way home tonight, and hopefully this time I’ll manage to finish it within the four hours! I’m not sure I have the time for all the testing the Guignol deserves, but I should be able to hammer out a four-hour game.

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It looks like I’m going to be in the Grand Guignol if at all this year. I want to make sure my effort is well-tested. Plus there will be nontrivial tricky bits.

It may be all for the best. A lot of times in past years a lot of my planning energy went into five or ten minute bursts of programming, which was fun, but I was left disjointed.

I’m excited already to see who else has ideas.

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I am still working on my entry. I have good ideas for puzzles, several involving a NPC. This is my first try at actually finishing a game with I7. I get bogged down with actions that I think should be easy to implement - not so much. I am finding Aaron’s Creating text and Jim Aiken’s Handbook to be useful for assistance.

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Right? Every time I think something should be easy, it’s not, and every time I think something will be really hard, I7 has an easy tool for it.

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Exactly! Sometimes the same code in the same location, one works one doesn’t!

For example:

After going south while player is in Pumpkin Museum: now player is in Welcome Center; now Greg is in Welcome Center.

[Why doesn't this work!!!]
After going east while player is in Pumpkin Museum: now player is in Gift Shop; now Greg is in Gift Shop.

Grrr. :wink:

At risk of taking the thread off topic, the issue here might be that you’re using a condition pegged on the location of the player during an action that moves the player, so something non-obvious could be happening. Dunno if you’re using the RULES testing command, but that can help diagnose whether your rules are during when you think they should be; if not, you might want to rewrite them to trigger off the player going a direction, or use the room gone from/room gone to action variables instead.

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This is a real question? I’m not sure if you have a wink that should be wink wink winky.

Thank you for the assistance. I looked up "room gone from/room gone to action variables. It would appear to be a sorting issue. There are lots of “laws”. More mysteries for Inform 7.

I may just start over with a more code based development system. I was trying to figure out I7. Time is passing…

PS. It is my fault the thread has been diverted. I will ask further questions in the I7 section.

Thanks again.

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The From room to room syntax worked!

Thank you for helping me solve that problem!

Only one issue left and all of my puzzles will be in place and only the narrative and its permutations will be left!

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I had originally intended to enter a little something into the Petite Mort section, but it looks like it might wind up going into the Grand Guignol category- fingers crossed, of course, that I finish it in time. If not, I most likely would enter it into SpringThing, when that rolls around.

So far it’s been shaping up to be a psychological horror piece, which is interesting, since I’ve never set out with the intent to pen something in that particular subgenre before. I’ve forgotten how much fun it can be to explore a story from the ground up.

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I plan to enter with at least one project, one autobio and one fiction. The latter was inspired by the IF In The 50 States thread that @aschultz was doing; the working title is, “Jersey Girl, Pluto Boy”. Because nothing is spookier than society’s gender norms.

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Possibly only society’s beauty norms are scarier, and you tackled that last year. Can’t wait to play the new games!

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Ok, so I’ve been promoting some ECTOCOMP in Spanish, in the IF Spanish network, with threads like this and this:

https://twitter.com/textualizame/status/1577597565251555331

https://twitter.com/textualizame/status/1577328783249604610

and as always I have this dichotomy: Those are not in English, nor do I have the time to duplicate the effort.

BUT, feel free to promote the comp in your own social networks, if you use the hashtag #ECTOCOMP2022 I will see it and retweet it.

Also, you can share the links around here. So we can all help with the sharing.

BUT!!!, I don’t think ECTOCOMP in English needs promotion outside of the community. It has very good health every year.

Less for the voting phase, that we always feel there are not enough votes. (So yeah, I think we should make marketing efforts when the time to play the games comes.)

Enjoy!

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Woah I’m only partially following the IF scene and had not noticed that ECTOCOMP had a section for entries in Spanish. I’m really happy to learn that because I’ve been learning Spanish and IF seems like a great way to practice and improve, and also because I think games made in less than 4 hours must be short! :slight_smile:
I’ll be sure to check the Spanish entries when the voting time comes. :slight_smile:

(also thanks for the tweets about the history of the comp, they were quite interesting)

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Nice! I ope you like the event!

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Hoping this collabo I’m working on gets done in time for ECTOCOMP. That’s what we are aiming for anyway.

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Ok, I have something important to announce:

Now #ECTOCOMP comes in three languages!!!

Welcome to the French community, thanks to the co-hosting by @smwhr

Dis bonjour!!!

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:wave:

I couldn’t let pass this awesome opportunity to link our communities (spanish, english, french, the younger discord/tumblr crowd) in a shared event that acknowledges that we speak different languages but still share the same love of the interactive, the written and the fictional (and the spooky of course !)

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