Here’s the 2026 update of my Excel spreadsheet listing all IFComp games by development system back to 1995.
As well as development system details for this year’s games, the spreadsheet includes full result details for all entries from previous years, 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.
Here is the spreadsheet:
And here are the numbers this year by development system:
There are 30 games with some form of parser, and 41 without.
EDIT: The dev system for the Z-Code entry “WITHOUT corporation” has now been corrected from Inform to ZIL & “Days in a Van with your 3 Best Friends” has been changed from Custom Web to cirqueSaw.
EDIT 2: The authoring system for “Uninteractive Fiction 3” has been amended from Twine to GDevelop JS.
EDIT 3: Following feedback I’ve updated the spreadsheet to split the comp release format(s) for games developed in Inform, Dialog and ZIL (i.e.: Z-Code, Glulx & Å-Machine) into a separate column and changed the table in this post to only show the development system.
EDIT 4: I’ve amended the Inform version number to 6P for the PunyInform games in this year’s and previous comps and thank Allyson Gray for providing details of the format (Harlow, SugarCube, Chapbook) for each of this year’s Twine games. The Twine dev. data now includes version (1 or 2) and format for all historical games and for those entered in Spring Thing.
Hmmm. Yes, as tzbits has pointed out, Z-machine, Å-machine (and Glulx for that matter) are the author’s chosen release format and not the development system per se.
The distinction is useful, of course, to anyone who wants to play the relevant game offline when downloading comp games as the format determines which interpreter(s) to use. For that reason the IFComp has always given the release format rather than the development system.
I attempted to retain that data in the spreadsheet, as I, and others had found it useful. People seem interested in stats on which games released as Z-code were developed in Inform 6 as compared to Inform 7 and how that ratio has changed from comp to comp, or the use of Glulx versus Z-code.
My preference here would be to split the data into separate columns, so dev system (Inform, Dialog, ZIL, or whatever), and comp release format(s) (Z-code, Å-machine, Glulx, etc.). This could also be useful in other instances such as where someone releases their comp game in different formats for web play as against offline.
If that approach sounds useful, I’ll look at making the changes.
Thanks. Yes. I think I need to look at splitting the authors’ delivery format(s) for their comp games out into a separate column where that distinction is relevant. So the development system would be Inform, Dialog, ZIL, or whatever, and the comp delivery format would Å-machine, Z-code, Glulx, etc.
This would also provide a potentially useful level of granularity when it comes to dev system vs comp release format(s) for certain games.
Can you distinguish between Inform 6 and Inform 7 if you haven’t already done so, as they are completely different programming languages and the distinction is needed in places like IFDB and IFWiki. Both can be compiled to Z-code and Glulx, depending on factors such as the size of the game.
In fact, it would be handy to distinguish between Inform 6 standard library and PunyInform, as the latter is small enough that it can usually be deployed to retro platforms, but it can’t be compiled to Glulx.
While the spreadsheet lists the development system as Inform for both, the version is given in the next column so it’s easy to get data on the use of Inform 6 vs 7 (or 5, for that matter).
I’d been thinking about splitting out the Punyinform games (for example, by giving them a version of 6P), but haven’t done so yet. I’ll look at doing that.
From memory, I think all but one of the Inform 6 games this year may have been Punyinform.
On the topic of differentiation, it might also be worth eventually noting in the secondary column which Twine format was used (e.g. Harlowe, Sugarcube, Chapbook, Snowman), if that would be in line with your vision? I’ve found them to be very different in terms of syntax, features, etc.
Thanks for the suggestion. It’s something I’d like to do, but there’ll be some work involved and I don’t have much spare time at the moment. I’ll try to add the Twine format data at some stage before the comp ends.
The IFComp Dev. System spreadsheet has now been updated to include the version (1 or 2) and format (SugarCube, Harlowe, Snowman, Chapbook, Sugarcane, Jonah, etc) of all Twine games entered into IFComp since 2012.
The Spring Thing tab has also been updated to include the additional Twine data.
