Thanks for all the replies folks! It’s lovely to hear from you all.
Re the competition moving up a month, here’s what the IFComp website says at the moment (IFComp - About the Competition)
IMPORTANT UPDATE FOR IFCOMP 2024 : The ‘intent to enter’ date, final game deadline, voting period, and awards stream will all move up one month. The updated schedule will go live on our site Jan 1, 2024, but in the meantime, authors should note that intents are due Aug 1, 2024, and games must be uploaded by Aug 28, 2024.
So yes, thinking about entering sooner rather than later would be good this time around!
Yep, they’ve moved IFComp a month forward so that it doesn’t clash with ECTOCOMP! I’m still reeling from this a bit, because I started ECTOCOMP sixteen years ago as little annual jam for Adrift users. The first one had four entries! It grew and grew and under @Ruber_Eaglenest and @smwhr’s expert management it’s become one of the “big three” IF events of the year - in three languages! The overlap between IFComp and ECTOCOMP was awkward right from the very beginning, and now they’ve moved IFComp? I feel slightly dizzy thinking about it. My baby is all grown up.
It’d be fun to enter IFComp again, but I currently don’t since I help check the entries early and it would be a conflict of interest.
If I did, the game I’d like to write next is one where you are a bank robber in the Great Depression era, and all of the characters are drawn from famous books like To Kill a Mockingbird, Great Gatsby, or Grapes of Wrath. It’d be lighthearted and puzzle-focused.
I also wanted to offer my prize again this year of writing a short game set in the prize-chooser’s universe; I just wasn’t sure how long it would take me to finish my current WIP. Hopefully I can offer it next year, although I have a fun idea for a long Hosted Games choicescript game I might work on instead!
Working on a VN presentation mode. So games can be presented either in IF mode - where text has priority over pictures orVN mode, where pictures prioritise text. Also animation.
Here’s a shot from my forthcoming superhero comedy spoof;
Man and His Symbols is a collaboration between Jung himself and four of his associates. It was inspired by an interview with the BBC journalist John Freeman, who pressed Jung to write down his fundamental ideas in a book meant for the wider public.
The first edition, 1964 J.G. Ferguson Publishing, ISBN 0-385-05221-9, was in English. The Internet Archive has a copy:
I always intend to enter IFComp, and then I always burn myself out by making too many games for other comps earlier in the year. Will 2024 be different? Who knows. But it’d be lovely to take part for once.
For me it was Adrift, but to me the most powerful one is TADS. (Note that I say in both cases “for me”, because the experience might differ for other people.)
I have a rough idea, a title and some initial concept art ready to go for next year’s entry, but a lot will depend on how much spare time I can find between now and then!
My observation is that a lot comes down to personal idiosyncrasies. We all think differently, and this question in particular seems to demonstrate that. There are smart people who don’t get Inform (6 or 7, which are very different), and smart people who don’t get TADS. Some fortunates get all three, but that doesn’t seem to be typical.
Maybe try to make one room with both (Inform 7 and TADS), see how it feels. They’re pretty different, so you’ll likely find yourself more interested in one than the other.
I personally wouldn’t set out to learn ADRIFT unless I already knew that I was interested in it (please don’t be upset, ADRIFT fans! )
I would love to, and there’s an idea I’m working on, but right now I want to concentrate on another, non-IF project. If that gets finished in time, maybe! One month less time certainly makes things more interesting.
I followed your advice and downloaded some inform source code from the Source Code Amnesty Day thread. Lots of really good stuff there. I also stopped reading and started writing. So far, so good.
)
2024: the year of the rat quotient!