So… you know the drill. Are you not tired enough of developing and playings games for the IFComp? Don’t worry, #ECTOCOMP2019 is ready to deplete your remaining energies.
This year we have a special tribute to a very special work of Interactive Fiction. It is very hard to miss.
Remember, the objective is to create spooky (or not) text-based games that celebrate the Autumn festivities. Because of that, the games should be ready BEFORE Halloween or Dia de Los Muertos or Noche de Difuntos. That is, BEFORE October 30th.
ECTOCOMP is a light-spirited ranked competition hosted at itchio.com. There are two languages, and only two categories, for games done quickly in under 4 hours, or games that took more than 4 hours to create.
This year we have some experimental features, so, please, read the rules carefully.
It’ll have to be the latter. Everything is built into the site, and it’s like 20 years old and unlikely to ever get an update like that at this point.
Thanks for the info, I had a couple of friends interested, but they were too frightened and confused to consider writing it in anything else, and too intimidated to make accounts and ask here. This information should warm their fragile blown glass hearts. (Hopefully in a slow and steady temperature controlled manner, for safety…)
Are there any special guidelines for submitting a Python file? I have a small idea, and I think a more primitive parser than what Inform offers would actually help people focus on what they need to do.
Those are good suggestions. I need an excuse to learn Inform 6. But in this case, the game is really minimal, as even taking is not a command, and it can’t quite be done in Twine or ChoiceScript. Well, it could be, but it would take over 4 hours to program.
I don’t want to spoil too much, but it relies on doing some calculations that are easier to do with regular programming than natural language programming e.g. “x % 3” vs “the remainder after dividing x by 3”. In this case it’s only saving a few keystrokes, but stuff like creating and manipulating lists is also trickier in Inform than in python, because Inform focuses on doing different things efficiently.
I’d like to see what I can do to convert a python file to a Windows or Linux executable to run. Obviously I should do as much as I can to make a game playable and accessible, and I have over a week to look into that.
hey, I’m speaking from memory, but what about that that Inform 7 did a great effort to support math and formulae? Probably you are already aware, but I’m mentioning this just in case
I’ve messed with PyInstaller once or twice and it seems to work. Dunno if you can use it to build Windows binaries under Wine, but I could probably bundle your game for you if you don’t have a Windows machine handy…
This may be worth a look. I’ve never used it so I don’t know if it is complete / performant enough to use. On the other hand I have turned python files into Windows binaries before I wished I was at the dentist for a root canal instead (mind you it was 10 or so years ago so the process is hopefully smoother now).
I hate to ask…and maybe this isn’t the place to…but how do you actually submit a game?
I’ve got an itch.io account, went to the ectocomp page, and clicked “submit your project”…but then a window opens up with two options: to upload a game (which I did) or to go to my dashboard.
I’ve uploaded a game…but I’m not certain it’s actually been submitted to this jam…I think it’s just sitting there on my account.
Can you pick it from your dashboard? Jams on itch end up making a separate jam page for your game and I know people submit existing games to jams. Go to the Ectocomp page and see if yours is listed under the submissions tab.
I also struggled with the jam submission - it’s a bit convoluted. Somehow I submitted Animalia at first, and it took me a long time to figure out how to remove the submission. ANYWAY I think you have to upload and then separately submit your newly-uploaded game to the jam in two separate steps. I hope this helped, apologies if it didn’t.
Whatever you want or can.
