You should! I’ve been getting very into historical fiction recently and I love seeing the sorts of narratives a historian finds in a given time period.
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well, aside that I will never again partecipate to this comp, I’m still recovering the time lost because of the demoralisation following the big honking incident of the last IFComp, so you should wait at least the spring '27…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
(perform [tell $Actor to | $Action])
(now) (current player $Actor)
(div @techie) { Got (the $Actor) on the comms. }
(try $Action)
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(game over {You have shattered})
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This year I’m working on a tie-in with my upcoming Choice of Games title, Spire, Surge, and Sea (out later this month!).
Here’s a teaser:
ETA: and now I figured out what my actual game mechanic will be! That means less flailing, which hopefully means more writing.
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I figured a new place to cache a final bonus point. I sort of wanted to tease it here, but it might be a spoiler.
But it might not have happened without this thread’s creation, so yay.
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Only 41 days to go! (38 for entries)
New teaser:
_________ ______
____/ __ \____ _ _ ___/ /
___/ /_/ / __ \ | /| / / /
__/ ____/ /_/ / |/ |/ /_/
_/_/ _\____/|__/|__(_)
_______________________
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(descr #gates)
Stone walls that tower over you, an opening big enough for at least three people to move through at once, and a gate studded with weird black bolts that’s probably strong enough to keep enemies out, even if they have spears. The whole thing would be terrifying enough even if there weren’t (zlink {soldiers}) standing guard.(when $Spell can’t enchant #gates)
You start to apply (the $Spell) to the gates, but as soon as it gets close to the black bolts it starts sputtering and steaming. You snatch it back before the (zlink {soldiers}) notice the acrid smell in the air—good thing their noses aren’t very good!
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Dang, you’re making it less and less likely I’ll avoid learning Dialog. Like I have time.
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You should! It takes some getting used to, but once you’re past the initial hump, it’s really nice for IF coding. The fact that you can trivially tweak or even rewrite any part of the parser as needed is what sold me on it, after too much grappling with the internals of Inform’s Parser__parse.
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While relatively few Hittite myths survive, we do have Hittite translations of the Hurrian epics known as the “Kumarbi Cycle”, which provide insight into the Hurrian gods who were adopted into the Hittite pantheon.
In the Epic of Kumarbi, the god Kumarbi launches a coup against the previous king of the gods, the personified sky. He castrates the sky and in the process becomes pregnant with the storm god Tessop, who is born when the Fates split open Kumarbi’s skull to let him out. Kumarbi demands that the Fates let him eat Tessop, but they give him a stone instead, and Tessop grows up to overthrow Kumarbi and take his place as king. The parallels to the (much later) Greek myth of Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus are striking.
In the Epic of Hedammu, Kumarbi creates an enormous sea monster called Hedammu to defeat Tessop. Tessop’s sister, the magic goddess Savoska, discovers the plot, and Tessop attempts to fight Hedammu, but the resulting conflict almost destroys humanity altogether; the other gods insist on a nonviolent solution. Savoska seduces Hedammu to get close enough to magically poison him, but what happens after that is unknown; presumably the poison weakens him enough for Tessop to kill him, like in the Hittite story of Illuyanka.
In the Epic of Ullikummi, Kumarbi now creates a stone giant called Ullikummi, anchored to the shoulders of the titan who holds up the sky, and sends it after Tessop. Tessop tries to fight it like he did with Kumarbi himself, but it’s too strong; Savoska tries to seduce it like she did with Hedammu, but it has no thoughts or emotions. When Ullikummi seals Tessop’s wife in her temple, the siblings venture to the Underworld to retrieve a primordial artifact: the only thing that can separate Ullikummi from the titan is the knife that was once used to split the sky from the earth. The end of this one is also lost, but it probably ends with Tessop victorious.
There are several other poems in the cycle, but most are only known from short fragments.
I’m trying to avoid filling my projects with unnecessary academic details about the Bronze Age, but there’s so much cool stuff in history!
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I’m trying to get a game ready in time for IFComp for a change.
I kind if hedged my bets a little though by choosing a spooky-ish theme with the theory that if I miss the IFComp deadline, at least I’ll have an entry for ectocomp ready instead 
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Arbitrage rates on copper were less favorable than on gold—the silver-to-gold exchange rate was as low as 5:3 in Mizri and as high as 48:1 in the Empire—but it was a safer bet while Mizri and the Empire were at war, and Ugarit flourished off it.
Everyone loves puzzles about the different going rates of copper vs silver vs gold in different city-states, right?
(Source: Heltzer 1977, The Metal Trade of Ugarit and the Problem of Transportation of Commercial Goods)
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It’ll be sure to be quite a contender against my game about the insurance market in 1800s transatlantic trade.
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Finally, the Return of the Obra Dinn sequel we’ve all been clamoring for!
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GOD DAMN IT!
[quietly deletes WIP, scooped]
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I procrastinated my IFComp game with an idea for a Petite Mort entry.
It has graphics! (The PM entry, that is.)
Anyway, back to IFComp. I figured I’d use this topic as self-motivation. Oh, and to have something posted now intfiction is back up.
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