[i]Amidst the night fog of the city lies a quiet, almost abandoned Shop of Curiosities. If a traveler ever stopped to enter it, they might find, among aged grimoires and odds and ends of all shapes and sizes, a fortune teller machine of the kind that is usually found at fairs and penny arcades. The fortune teller itself looks like a blue, blobby jellyfish with yellow tentacles and is wearing a jeweled turban for full Wizardly effect. On the machine hangs a sign:
IF COMP PREDICTIONS $2$150 CENTSTWO BITS THEY’RE FREE – JUST PULL THE LEVER!
If that same traveler should pull the lever, this is what they might hear:[/i]
Hope you folks are okay drinking from the firehose, 'cause this will be the first IF Comp since 2001 to have 50 or more games!
About 1/3 to half of those games will be written in Inform, with most of the rest being made in choice-based engines like Twine or Undum.
Speaking of choice-based engines, at least three games this year will be made in Choose Your Story.
And this year will have the first Ren’py game entered in the Comp.
Moving on, this year’s winning game will have a squid in it somewhere.
Looking for love? This year’s Comp will have at least two romance games.
The Golden Banana of Discord will go to a game about alien abductions.
Expect at least one Shuffle Comp run-off game. (I.E., a game that was written for Shuffle Comp but wasn’t finished in time.)
And, finally, someone will definitely enter a game with Batman in it. I will eat my hat if this is not so. I will eat my hat, and then make an autobiographical Twine game about it called Healy Eats a Hat!
Preamble taken from the last two threads. Sorry it’s late. Post your own IF Comp predictions in this thread!
2+ games with eels, one of which will be an environmental sympathy piece.
One game with a running joke about a ladder.
4+ games with a Devil, but none will have beards, tails, or pitchforks.
3 Simulator games about raising an entity (city, animal, baby).
7+ games that are artistic pieces pushing the boundaries about what it really means to be called a “game”.
1 game too depressing for me and I tap out early.
5 games that specifically describe a character’s ears (with a feature or an action). None of these will support “Examine Ear(s)”.
At least five games will offer you a choice of gender. Two of them will reject this choice; one of them will not include ‘male’ and ‘female’ among the options; and one of them will let you change gender at any point in the game, as often as you want.
Of the games set on Earth where location can be sufficiently established, 80% will be set within the United States.
The coincidental themes of this year will be lumberjacks, dangerous fungi, spider-people, and Impi.
10% of games will be written in homebrew or non-IF-specific platforms.
20% of games will be fanfic. Of these, one-third will never specify their fandom and you’ll have to figure it out by Googling character names.
One game will be set in a near-future independent Scotland.
There will be at least four authors who contribute more than one game apiece.
There will be three games including the word ‘simulator’ in the title, in two of which ‘simulator’ just means ‘a game about’.
Two major authors will submit pseudonymous entries that they planned specifically for the 20th anniversary of the IFComp. One will win and the other will place surprisingly poorly.
An Inform 7 entry will win, but 2nd and 3rd will be Twine.
There will be 3 or less TADS games, none of which will be in the Top 10.
There will be two games fairly reminiscent of Coloratura.
Ryan Veeder and Porpentine will both have non-pseudonymous entries, and will both get in the Top 5.
…AND IT WILL EITHER BE PORPENTINE, OR A 14-YEAR-OLD.
3+ games will have “fixme” or “under construction” notices in the middle of seemingly-important rooms or scenes.
Porpentine will enter a highly metaphorical and controversial Twine game about a deep personal or social issue.
1 game will feature surprisingly good graphics in a surprisingly half-baked point-and-click system.
There will be a cooking puzzle.
4+ games will feature an excessive number of made-up fantasy words. 1 of these will be almost completely incomprehensible.
At least 1 game will feature cave exploration, in an unique way. At least 1 other game will feature castles and probably dragons, in a completely generic way.
Two offer a choice, by my count (CSAW, Icepunk). Neither of them do anything fancy with it (or acknowledge the choice at any point thereafter, as far as I could tell.)
I make it about 53% US settings, but there are a lot of games I’m unsure about.
Alas, no. Serial killers, cyber-dystopias and time-travel.
Sigmund’s Quest, Milk Party Palace, AlethiCorp, Building the Right Stuff. 9.5% is close enough for me. (edit: crap, no, also Caroline. still think that 12% counts as a win.)
None whatsoever. Which makes plenty of sense in retrospect.
For the record–I didn’t plan it for the 20th anniversary. Though I was pleasantly surprised with the placing. The game felt a bit like leftovers as I planned it, and I didn’t really add all the info I could’ve, though there’s still a lot of post-comp stuff to be done. Though I’m flattered if you think my place was surprisingly poor [emote]:)[/emote].
I’m a little sad Harry Giles was the only high placer from previous competitions (Chinese Room) to come back for #20 after a break of a few years, though Raik was enjoyable. Well, there’s always next year!