The games are all up and available from ifcomp.org/ or your friendly local IF Archive mirror. Enjoy!
Thank you for getting them out so fast this year! I appreciate it.
Yeah, I’m amazed at how fast these were up! The competition doesn’t even technically start until tomorrow, right? (checks clock) Well, October 1st, I mean.
Slight bug: A bunch of games have their uploaded date as 1969-12-31 on the info page. At first I noticed it in the description of Guilded Youth and though it was some joking collusion between the author and the organizers, then I noticed it in a bunch of other descriptions and realized it was a mistake.
A lot of the speed is thanks to inky, who’s automated a lot of what used to be fiddly manual steps for me. Most of the time delay now is me checking that games work, regularizing how they’re listed on the site, etc.
Thanks for letting me know about the date bug. The “updated date” feature is a new one this year, and is clearly Not Quite Right yet.
That was super fast! I’m so excited!
A question about cover art: how come full-size cover art isn’t included with the feelies?
I’m looking into that.
It’s a very good thing that most web-based games are provided in the zip for download and offline play.
However. Three games just provide the URLs.
One of these - Howling Dogs. A Twine game. I’m mystified as to why the other twine games were made available and not this one.
The other one - Living Will. An UNDUM game. It’s perfectly possible to distribute an UNDUM game offline. The author doesn’t even need to do anything - just distribute a ZIP with all the files involved, in the same structure as it is on the webpage
Lastly, Gilded Youth - this is the only one I understand, since Vorple has only recently been “released” and still has some things to iron out, and it’s understandable that offline support is not high on their list. And yet I still hope for the day when a Vorple (or maybe Parchment? Dunno where the underlying issue is) game can be downloaded for offline play.
It being 1.15am and me being tired and exceedingly angry at the two first offenders of my list, I wish I could boycott them thoroughly in this competition. No doubt I’ll feel saner in the morning, but no less disappointed and frustrated by this inane persistence in not allowing people to save their games to their hard drives to play when they wish and under whatever circumstances (such as internet trouble, or playing on someone else’s net-less system) they wish.
You can, you know. If I have trouble playing a game because of compatibility issues or whatever, then I don’t play it and don’t vote on it.
Yes. There is also a grand tradition of protest-voting a 1 for Things You Thoroughly Disapprove Of. That’s… sort of a dick move, in some cases, but it’s useful in others. (It’s how the comp has traditionally dealt with the What Is IF? chestnut: let in everything and let the voters sort 'em out.)
Peter, you can download Guilded Youth here: http://nomediakings.org/guildedyouth/Guilded%20Youth.zblorb
Of course it’s much more boring in a regular interpreter.
Peter, if you post about this anymore I am going to have start seriously thinking about thoroughly boycotting your posts. I know I am acting rude, and I understand your predicament, but surely in this case you’d have been better off contacting Sargent about this through PMs or e-mail or similar?
Even then, I hope you understand there’s very little Sargent can do if someone does not want their web-playable game to be archived for whatever reason. If you care about playing these games offline so much, surely you can work out an arrangement with the authors? Maybe it just never occurred to them that people would want to play their games offline! I’m sure they would find it very flattering that someone cared about their games so much that they would want to play them whenever and wherever they wanted.
Heck, while I was writing this someone came in and showed how you could play one of the offending games offline! Can’t be that hard to find a way to play the rest, right?
Please don’t punish Jim for deficiencies in the technical system over which he has no direct control. Rate the game for its own merits (or don’t rate at all) and send hate mail for bringing down the Western civilization to me.
I have no intention of following through with the “boycott” (hey, a boycott of one! What an impact!), even if there IS a history of things like that happening and if it IS a way for people to express disappointment/disagreement. It screws up the whole voting thing, and in that case not voting is best. Heck, I’ve never voted on an IFComp before because I never managed to play all the games beforehand. If I’m that sort of person, I’m surely not going to vote “Awful” because of meta-issues.
Predictably, I feel saner now in the morning. Still pissed off, but on a larger, more serene level, at the world’s insistence in iPhone-only, iPad-only, Online-only games. Nothing to do with this community in general.
Danii: yes I can. But if it’s not to be playable the way the author intended it to be playable, it would be best not to play it at all. Especially since it looks so damn cool. I’ve played “A Colder Light” offline; I’ve downloaded “Llama Adventure”; and Jim’s game (and let me make clear again that Jim is just the author, and Vorple a relatively new interpreter - I understand these the most) looks über-sweet. I wouldn’t play “Everybody Dies” without the graphics, either.
Healy - Boycott away. But before you do, take a look at my posting history. It’s nothing to do with this Comp - it’s a thing of mine. Every time a web-only game is released I’m there asking, cajoling, BEGGING for a version that I can keep in my collection and play whenever I wish. The most constructive criticism I ever had - by far much more constructive than yours - was by Erik Temple, who gently but firmly pointed out it would behoove me to learn ways of extracting the game from the website myself. Now I only talk about these things when I’ve tried that and there’s no way. Because I’ve half a mind to rip the UNDUM game’s site just to get to the game. And I know I can download the Twine one. But in these particular cases, that’s not the point.
EDIT - Juhana, your interepreter is awesome and I wouldn’t dream of sending you hate mail.
The mp3 is also missing from Andromeda Apocalypse’s feelies. I wrote Marco so he can act more officially (as the author of the game) when he wakes up.
- Wade
I submitted the Howling Dogs file–apparently IF archive takes a bit of time to update (I’m unfamiliar with it), but I’m happy to link it off my own space.
Here is an alternate download for howling dogs.html: aliendovecote.com/uploads/twine/
The game has images that require an internet connection, but they are minimal and their absence is trivial.
The Howling Dog html file was submitted after the actual release date of the games, which is why it’s not on the IF Archive.
The music for Andromeda Apocalypse was likewise not submitted in time for the competition.
Along with those, files for Living Will and Guilded Youth will be in the next update.
Porpentine - thank you for the link and the information. Regarding the images… are they defined by their full path, or by the subfolder “images”? Because maybe in the case of the latter, distributing the folder would suffice to enable offline viewing? But I don’t really know how Twine works…
Sargent, thank you very much for your very helpful response. I look forward to the update. I trust there will be a file indicating which games were updated and which weren’t?..
Images are linked from my webspace. It would be possible to write a version that linked to a packaged directory of images that ran on the desktop but for a short Twine game, I don’t think I’ll be doing that soon.
Understandable. Obviously my view differs from you on that, but you’re the author and I’ve already made my arguments. [emote]:)[/emote]
Incidently, I wasn’t thinking about “desktop”, that would be limiting, merely a subfolder called “Images” placed wherever (offline) the original game happened to be.