IFComp 2025 - Games by Development System (Belated post)

Competitions IFComp
1

Here, rather belatedly, is the 2025 update of my Excel spreadsheet listing all IFComp games by development system back to 1995.

I’d normally post this in the first couple of days of the Comp. My excuse for not doing so this time is that when the Comp started I was in the Gobi Desert, Mongolia, and away from my PC. I’ve only recently returned home and started turning my mind to things like IFComp, and everyday concerns, such as where I’ll be getting my fermented yak butter from now that I’m back.

As well as development system details for the latest crop of games, I’ve included the full results details for the 2025 entries, including; place in the comp, Rising Star and Miss Congeniality awards, average score, number of votes, standard deviation and Golden Banana award, and individual columns for the number of votes by score. The separate tab for Spring Thing games has also been updated to include this year’s entries.

So here, FWIW now that IFComp 2025 discussions are winding down, is the updated IFComp Game by Dev. System spreadsheet:

The number of games by development system for IFComp 2025 was:

image
image309×610 8.89 KB

There were 33 games with some form of parser, and 52 without.

As ever, corrections are welcome.

Cheers,

Steve

18 Likes
2

Thanks again!

And wow, I was a bit shocked my entry was the only Z-Code/Inform 7 game. It’s becoming a very specialized niche with the (welcome) rise of PunyInform, and with Inform having so many features that entries quickly get to be Glulx.

8 Likes
3

How many of the Glulx/Inform 7 games are version 7.10?

PS. I find it amazing how large the shift has been in development over the last 5-10 years.

2 Likes
4

16 of the 21 are 7.10.

2 Likes
5

Has there been a big shift? I feel like this 2:3 ratio of parser to hypertext games has been the case for a long time, and Inform 7 and Twine have been the most popular tools for a long time. Pretty sure it was the case when I last entered the comp 10 years ago…

7 Likes
6

This spreadsheet is amazing, thank you!

4 Likes
7

In terms of the proportion of parser vs choice games entered in the Comp, the big shift came in 2013, following the arrival of Twine in 2012. Since 2013 there hasn’t been any major change.

image
image220×525 4.17 KB

Inform 7 has been the dominant parser dev. system since taking over from Inform 6 in 2008, with Glulx games entered in IFComp starting to clearly outnumber Z-code from about 2015.

6 Likes
8

I love how one person has single-handedly kept Alan 3 relevant for decades. The games are always fun, too.

Adventuron seems like it’s subsiding in popularity.

9 Likes
9

Thanks for sharing this when you did! I am writing a post mortem and my takeaways are very much a reflection on the authoring tool and trying to make sense of others. I am so grateful for Adventuron. I never thought I’d ever author an IF game, and it has been such a wonderful experience to think about storytelling through its constraints and opportunities, and to capture all the retro feels. In this month of gameplay though, the “Infocom feel” of what I’ve put together as Inform has me investigating what storytelling looks like that way. It looks like less object wrestling. However from my perspective, it looks like neither logic or natural language. Either way, too fatigued to dive into anything now, just reflecting for later!

4 Likes
10

Huh. Is it that uncommon for people to like… hack something together in Python or something? It’s a common enough assignment in CS classes to make a command line UI for a widget that I’d expect it to be at least an uncommon way to make IF…

Maybe next year, there will be a line with “Python. Just Python??” for my entry. I’m considering releasing it via an interpreter embedded in a webpage, or maybe the same with a VM or something? I dunno, just spitballing.

Maybe I am a real hacker…

7 Likes
11

That’s how I started out making text games! Having no idea about the IF community, I submitted to Ludum Dare and a random Itch jam. Though they were kind of numbers-based things rather than anything resembling parser fiction. I think unless you are making outsider art you’d probably want to use an existing engine to shortcut most of the things that would be expected.

IIRC there was a ‘just Python’ entry that unfortunately came last in the Comp a few years ago, but I think it didn’t work properly? (To be fair, neither did my games!)

3 Likes
12

It’s certainly not unheard-of, but it is a lot of work just to essentially reinvent the wheel. (At least, if you’re trying to do anything complex at all.)

8 Likes
13

It happens – see for instance Jungle adventure from IFComp 2022 – but it’s tricky to get judges to actually play and vote on such works (that one got 22 votes, where the mean number of votes that year was about 60).

(See also this IFDB search for “Python” as a development system, although that includes more elaborate works using e.g. pygame.)

5 Likes
14

We’ve had a python entry in an event somewhere—it might have been Spring Thing. IIRC there was some resistance to downloading python and executing the thing.

4 Likes
15

Makes sense. And embedding it in a webpage is just annoying enough that I imagine most wouldn’t bother.

1 Like
16

It’s fun too.

4 Likes
17

As far as I can tell, there’ve only ever been six games in IFComp that were written directly in Python. There’ve also been a couple written using Python-based engines, one in Ren’Py and one in IntFicPy.

A total of three native Python games have been entered in Spring Thing, as well as nine created with Ren’Py.

4 Likes
18

True! But often more for the creator than for potential players.

4 Likes
19

I wrote one of the Python IFComp games and one of the Python Spring Thing games.

For each one, I wanted a super-limited parser so I didn’t have to contend with Inform’s defaults and I could say “Okay, do this.” I also wanted to be able to chain commands.

And actually, I could have written Walking Into It (a Tic-Tac-Toe simulation) in Twine, and it would probably have been more accessible, because people could click on squares.

As mim mentioned, Python entries are fun to write, but I found there were technical issues even with a relatively bare-bones version–which I specifically went for to minimize such issues.

I had to make sure version 2 and 3 of Python worked, and I even needed to say “OK, pip install colored-text” or whatever because in lieu of graphics, I thought colored text would help things look better & it wasn’t a VERY big module. Riiight?

The other entry was Write or Reflect, where Python worked great because the mechanic was simply typing W or R, or you could combine them. Inform has regex support, but it’d be a lot harder, and again I didn’t want to have to deal with verbs, just focus on the binary choice.

And again it could’ve been done in Twine as well, where visuals would have been handy. But things were even quicker to whip together for me, since I knew Python and only really knew the basics of Twine/javascript.

I’ve found Python entries have that old school charm and it’s fun to imagine how the author wrote the parser, but they do wind up having holes. That said, I can see how I could rewrite Us Too in Python using classes for each point-scoring action. I’d just drive myself nuts implementing the actual standard verbs.

11 Likes
20

That makes a lot of sense! I guess the reason that I’m aching to write a thing in Python is because I have a limited parser dungeon crawler in mind. I’m no good at graphical elements anyway (just look at that sad Mooncrash! cover art!), so I just… don’t plan to add many/any at all. So a lot of the main tools would be overkill, and the built-in stuff more of a hindrance than a help. The main parts of the idea is are the actual code (which Python makes as seamless as possible for me personally), the writing (no game engine can save me), and hosting (probably the only thing that a pre-built solution would be helpful for).

Maybe I just don’t know the right tool for the job, though! I’m happy to hear suggestions, but this may be the wrong thread for it.

1 Like