Well I can say to interested observers that the game I’m writing is supposed to be 10 IFComp size games put together at 20 hours total in time, but that when I tested your game it was longer than mine, had harder puzzles, and the text was significantly more verbose. It’s definitely among the All Time Big Game contenders I’ve encountered.
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I know there’ve been some changes since then to make the puzzles more manageable and nudge players to where they can make progress, but yeah, this is a big one! Cragne Manor is bigger I think, and after that I’m not sure - it’s a real epic!
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The cuteness of those little chicks bebopping made me tear up, I kid you not…
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Hi - thanks for the new authors thread, great idea.
This is my first game. It’s a short (many threads, but a single play-through will probably take < 30 minutes), choice-based game with a few simple game mechanics.
I come into IF games from a different angle. I’m a traditional writer, but I’ve also written ARG games. I’ve always loved IF (though am by no means an aficionado… can’t wait to dig into all the styles in the coming weeks).
What’s different about my game is that while I originally wrote it in Twine, I built the software to deliver the experience on chat platforms. Only Telegram is done at the moment (as a proof of concept), or, with a diminished experience, it can be played on the web. I have run literary journals before and find that scene very interesting. The end-goal is to publish IF games on chat platforms like a literary journal would (ie submission-based, curated). My software imports Twee files and then interfaces with bots. Anyway… sounds like I’m up against some stiff competition, and I may have taken on too much with attempting to do a tech proof-of-concept and write my first game (bites fingernails)…
My game is called The Whale’s Keeper. Thanks for listening!
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Gorgeous artwork, excited to see more.
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Hi all,
I joined this forum slightly over a year ago, after playing “Hunter, in Darkness” and searching for more cool stuff and info about this mysterious language called “Inform”. I have been playing IF for a long time, and even bought some books on writing your own adventure games, but never got quite around how to make it all work the way I wanted to.
But when I came across Inform … I saw possibilities to make my own game to share with the world after all. All the helpful people on this forum definitely helped me out on getting up to speed with all the “nice” and “not-so-nice” intricacies of Inform7. (programming is my background, and maybe it would have been easier for me to stick to Inform6 but I digress.)
I have at present two games in partial completion state, and progressing slowly on those. But when the Single Choice Jam came along, I thought… Could I make that work for a parser game? I missed the deadline for the Jam by a mile but still I did not want to abandon my “small” game and kept working on it, polishing it up, rewriting bits, the works.
DavidW says, "This technique of using new verbs for the commands
reminds me strongly of Treasures of a Slayer's Kingdom."
Lancelot says, "yeah so I noticed a month after starting this :("
My heart sank when I learned about a month after I started there actually was another barbarian themed game out there with a limited vocabulary. But I did not want to abandon my project because I wanted to tell a story and I could not stop myself from trying to tell it. So now I entered in IFComp 2023, and let the world be the judge on the telling.
I thought great I can safely sit on my mountain and enjoy the view. Until the beta testing session with ClubFloyd came along, which took me down from my mountain and get to work on polishing up even more. Some more signposting, some lessons on proper handling of punctuation, etc. It all helps in making a better game.
As for my entry:
One King to Loot them All
A tale of High Adventure
(My artist asked me to sit down in a chair, holding a bunch of sticks as “weapons” and look threatening. Mission accomplished! That’s me, plus some bonus musculature 
.)
inventor exclaims, "YOOOOO!!! That's RAD!!"
Knight_Otu says, "Very Conan."
keltena says, "--oh wow, yeah, that IS rad. (The art just loaded for me.)"
DavidW says, "King Abs"
Jade says, "this is a really strong cover"
I have to remind my artist to build a website .
And then the testing seriously started.
The Author sat on his mountain, watching Team ClubFloyd climb its treacherous ways. He was biding his time, waiting, until they would reach the summit…
[clubfloyd] keltena says, "Incredible."
[clubfloyd] Pinkunz says, "Brilliant idea."
[clubfloyd] keltena says, "This is absolutely delightful."
[clubfloyd] Jade says, "fan-tastic"
[clubfloyd] inventor says, "Woaahhhhhhh"
[clubfloyd] DavidW says, "That's new."
The Author smiled. Magic still exists in this realm.
Join me in my tale of High Adventure!
Pinkunz exclaims, "We're Conan!!! Hell yeah!"
inventor exclaims, "YOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"
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I’m intrigued!
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my initial goal was to play around some with inform (i’m using inform 6) but it sort of turned into a full-fledged game.
the game is ‘the witch’ (id 2848). it’s a standard parser-based game. it’s totally in the vein of an old infocom game.
while i have loved many modern IF games and respect how ground-breaking some of them are, i really prefer a big parser-based puzzle-fest that takes me back to when i was thirteen years old, up past my bedtime playing ‘enchanter’ on my C64 while everybody else was asleep.
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Hi all! I’m completely new to both IF and the competition. I tried to be as ambitious as possible and created “The Ship” (entry ID: 2830), an interactive mystery novel which I’m extremely proud of. Here goes the blurb:
"It is the year 1719. A Captain embarks on an extraordinary voyage into the unknown, guided solely by a cryptic poem passed down as an unexpected family heirloom. A fabled promised land beckons, but as the Captain inches closer to their elusive destination, a series of extraordinary events unfold, prompting a profound reevaluation of identity and potential. Do they really know who they are? Who they could have been? What truly awaits at the journey’s end? And what formidable challenges must the Captain surmount to reach it?
Embark on a journey through a meticulously crafted universe teeming with enthralling characters and a richly developed world. Prepare to unravel a unique mystery with intricate puzzles, lifelike personalities, each with a different story to tell, and a tapestry of interconnected events. Will you manage to piece together the greater picture? Are you prepared for what or who you’ll find at the end of the line? Or for what comes after?"
I poured my heart and soul into this, and it made me fall in love with IF. I hope you have a great time playing/reading, just like I had designing and writing it! Cheers and good luck to all participants! <3
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Oh, that sounds fun! Looks like there’s going to be a fair number of nautical games this Comp, and I am here for it.
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It may be nautical, but it also may be more than that… 
it has a lot of twists and turns, and the blurb reveals as little as possible for the story. But I’m a sucker for nautical stuff too, can’t wait for the comp to kick off!
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Hi everyone! My name is Natasha Ramoutar (you can call me Tash though!) and I’m a first-timer here for IFComp. I’m a writer with a background mostly in fiction and poetry, although I’ve written on one other game called TYTYTY that was made in GB Studio.
I also made a nautical game for the competition - it’s so fascinating to see that there’s lots of others working on that theme and I’m excited to play them! My horror-mystery IF piece is called “All Hands” (entry ID: 2866). It’s an atmospheric little piece about exploring a strange ship that has docked at port in a world where the sea is exceptionally dangerous due to fantastical beasts. It’s a choice-based game and I made it in Texture Writer as part of Work With Indies’ writing circle led by Frankie Kavakich. The gameplay is buttons you can drag to different sections on the page in the style of an old point and click mystery game. I’ve tagged the game as 1 hour, but that’s really if you do absolutely every possible route and exhaust every option and puzzle!
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That sounds cool! Welcome!
I remember seeing some Texture games last year from a group of people. I think some of them went to NYU? Some of them were pretty fun. Was that part of the same group?
I look forward to your game!
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Fun - I love the emerging nautical theme. My piece, The Whale’s Keeper, starts off with the main character inside of a whale… so, I guess, also nautical? -ish?
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This is sort of like in 2010 when there were zombie games of all kind and quality.
BTW, for those new, the clawfoot bathtub is a sort of inside joke about something that appears in several different entries. Each year seems to have one. That may be more specific than “nautical game” but it still might be fun to look out for.
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Hey everyone! I’m Anja and this is my first time joining IFComp! I’m a writer, editor, and indie game dev with a background in media production (primarily Film and TV). This entry would make my third time making an interactive fiction game!
Super excited and look forward to see everyone’s entries. I’m seeing a lot of people using Twine (one of my favorite tools to make interactive fiction) and I’m excited to see what people come up with using it. My entry is a slice-of-life, surreal-ish exploration of grief called “Lonehouse”. You play as a younger sister having to sort through the belongings of your estranged older sister and learning more about her life through these different objects. This is my first time using Texture Writer to create a game!
I think working on this entry has been the most liberating and motivating thing as a writer and dev. I have to thank the writing circle I’ve had the pleasure to be a part of! It was also the first time I’ve joined a writing-focused group. They’ve all been incredibly supportive and it boosted my motivation to do my best with my project. Very different from if I were to work on this alone!
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Place your bets now—which of these categories do you think will have the most games in it?
- Nautical mysteries
- Non-nautical mysteries
- Nautical non-mysteries
0
voters
(Interpreting “non-nautical mysteries” very narrowly to keep it from being the obvious choice. Only whodunnits and the like go in that category.)
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I was just about to write something similar—the last few comps there’s been a thread that lists games with things in common, and it certainly seems like there’s a theme this time.
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I didn’t think of the girls in Leadlight as zombies myself (and persisted in saying so in the commentary track, later) but everyone else did. And player perception is the real reality.
So, if you enter what you think is a landbound adventure into this IFComp, and everyone says it’s actually a Nautical Non-Mystery, you should accept that you’ve made a Nautical Non-Mystery.
-Wade
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Another first-timer, here, with my entry, “Out of Scope.” It’s a political romance about two siblings whose establishment parents think have grown too close, and the effect that has on the family. I’m interested in which forms of love and violence our society condones, and which it condemns.
I’m a game developer with a lot of Unity experience, but my degrees are in creative writing. I wanted an opportunity to get back to that while using my more recent skillset. I daydream about novel storytelling methods, ways to address points of friction between players and authors, that kind of thing, so it was important to me to build the system for this, even though it put me into a position of having to do as much coding as writing, and to contend with the prospect of many more bugs, than an established tool would provide. I anticipate feeling some rue about that decision in the near future – ha.
The goal here was to implicitly build a sense of geography using text in 3D, and using spatial audio. A “single choice at a time” choice selection mechanism is my attempt to give the player agency over what a point of view character is thinking, but not necessarily their exact actions, in order to have more authorial control without undermining agency. I’m not sure whether it succeeded, and know for sure that there’s more I could with it, but it was fun to experiment, and it will be fun to collect feedback on these and other choices!
P.S. the flag in the title screen has an anchor on it, so count me in on the emerging theme.
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