Looks like I open the ball 
I won’t have more time to polish it until the deadline so I have to publish my entry as it is (at least I managed to get to an ending (multiple actually)).
What I learnt in the process : scoping is hard.
The deadline is not Monday? Hmmm. I thought people like to do things on weekends so contest deadlines should fall on Mondays.
Okay, mine’s up here Morgan, Carlo, and Mouse by MuffiTuffiWuffi - I think I spent way too much time on it, I sort of fugue-wrote most of it over basically all my time for the last week. I have no idea how it ended up so long, ChoiceScript is a good (bad) medium for letting you just vomit words all over the metaphorical page. Also it doesn’t have return values for its functions, you have to do global state mutation, which I’ve made my peace with already but still complain about.
I feel like two weeks is way too long for “speed” because if the timeframe lets me dump out a whole, uh, wow, I ended up at 24924 words (including code) which is like, 1/3 of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, that’s not really appropriate for a speed IF. Like. Speed stuff is supposed to force scope constraints, and that clearly didn’t happen? but it might be because I just spent so much of my time on it? I dunno, I’m kinda fried now.
As far as scheduling goes I think 7DRL (which I keep coming back to, I know) does a really good job, since they allow you to start in any 168-hour period bookended by the two weekends in your timezone. Like, uh, the period could be Friday August 20 - Monday August 30 and you pick any 168-hour contiguous time period, so you could start on Monday the 20th and end on Monday the 27th, or start on Sunday the 22nd and end on Sunday the 29th, and you just trust people to not cheat. It gives a lot of flexibility but keeps it to a week.
gah I really hope that all made sense
I think it depends on the person. Like a few months ago when I was currently unemployed, a couple weeks would have felt like a millenia. Now I only get a couple hours a day to work on it after my job, girlfriend, and other obligations.
Thank you!
I had an entry in progress, but I don’t think I’m going to make it - it’s still too fragmentary right now. I might have spent too much time implementing the books in the player’s backpack and not enough on assembling the skeleton of the story. (And to be fair, I didn’t realize the jam was going on until there was just one week left.)
My failure is based entirely around three interwoven problems that I struggle with:
-
I personally find puzzlefests with no storytelling to be incredibly boring, so I always try to add a story of some sort. But the story always ends up taking priority over the environments and puzzles, to the point that I sometimes forget to add game elements like puzzles.
-
I’m not a writer, so building this story world and plotting takes time. I think as I get more accustomed to plotting, this will probably be less of an issue. I’ve tried doing the word vomit method, and that works great for non-interactive short stories, but I’ve found that with games I quickly and quite easily paint myself into a corner.
-
As I do the plotting, the scope always expands from what should be a short story into a cinema-length movie script. There’s a talent to boiling a story down to only the essential elements for a condensed experience, and it doesn’t seem to be one that I can currently possess.
If I could just make plotless puzzlefests, I probably could have written a bajillion stories by now, because the coding is not an issue that I have at all. The problem is that I rarely even make it to the coding stage. And that was the case with this failed attempt as well.
I don’t enjoy puzzlefests. I too prefer story and environment more with embedded puzzles to keep it interesting and engaging.
There’s definitely a market for puzzlefests so I’m not poo-pooing them. I’m just not part of that market.
There’s a cure for that :
- Restrain yourself to 2000 words of story. It should have a beginning a middle and an end.
- Allow 500 to 1000 more to flesh out your character/choices/places/things that are important to the plot
Rinse and repeat.
Once you’re comfortable with that, allow yourself to write a story of 5 chapters of 3000 words each !
If this SpeedIF becomes recurrent, I’ll use that opportunity to swallow my own medicine (because, believe it or not, I do indeed have the same problems as you !)
That would cause me to start with in media res and ends with a cliffhanger. Then again, Frank Stockton’s The Lady, or the Tiger? is exactly that kind of story.
Still, I respect people who can write something like Hemingway’s 6 word story. Haiku IF, anyone?
Try as I might, I wasn’t able to get something finished for this Speed Jam, but I love the idea of it! Thank you for putting this together. I hope to submit a game to a future Jam!
IF Speed Jam #2 - later this year.
Thank you
I shall base my next game on Fredric Brown’s work.
You are the last man on Earth.
A ROOM
You sit alone in the room.
There is a knock on the door.
*** You win! ***
That would be a one room game but someone is in the hallway. 
You can still enter it at this comp.
DORM ROOM
You are alone in the room.
A knock on the door.
OPEN DOOR
Your girlfriend is at the door. She wants Pizza
(going to Student Center, according to map)
STUDENT CAFE
The lady server asks you, "What'll be?"
SAY PIZZA
Your girlfriend munches her pizza blissfully.
You win!
Will the topic be “The last man on earth” alone in the room, then? I think that’s a good premise.
I’ve been playing through the entries to this comp, and I was surprised at how inspirational it is. Unlike other comps where all of the entries are polished to the point of feeling intimidating, the entries in this one feel so indie (I know I’m using that term wrong, but you know what I mean) that it really gives the feeling that “You can do this too!” To the point that in hindsight I really wish I did just throw something random together instead of trying so hard.
IMO, making this comp a regular thing could have a really positive effect on the community, especially its new authors.
I know! Last night i decided to just hack together an entry and worked from 12 to 6am, like a speed Jam! The result; totally unpolished, probably many mistakes and a few bugs and terrible writing Sadly, i ran out of time building the ending i wanted and had to settle for something not great. I left 20 mins to actually make the submission, upload the files and fill in the forms.
10 minutes spare! Was awesome fun tho’
Are collaborations allowed i wonder?