I played games from the Infocom canon when I was very young (probably too young to appreciate), then largely ignored video games until age 35 or so and am now experiencing a renaissance. The novelty of the various flashy, new games on Steam has worn off and I find myself looking for something a little more thoughtful, a little more serious, a little more flexible.
I’m starting to poke around at what’s new in IF, mostly recently (started) Anchorhead, Birdman, Brain Guzzlers from Beyond!, and a few others. I’m particularly interested in high-quality recommendations in the mystery genre in all of CYOA, parser, and hypertext-based IF. I’d also be interested in recommendations of genre-bending IF: non-standard narratives, non-linear narratives, and non-narrative stuff generally.
Of course, I’ll also be trying my hand at authoring, probably starting with Quest for no reason other than having found it first. Any recommendations for a starting author with a coding background are appreciated, too.
Toby’s Nose is an excellent parser mystery. I enjoyed Who Among Us, a Twine mystery with occasional typos but a strong plot riffing on Agatha Christie.
For genre bending, you can try the Mary Jane of Tomorrow, a game that came out this year about teaching a robot, and set in the Brain Guzzlers world.
My name is Viktor, I am 29 years old and I work as an Indy software developer. I’ve recently discovered interactive fiction. I am currently playing Scavenger by Quintin Stone and am planning to write a review shortly.
Hello.
I don’t want to give my real name so you can call me C or by my username. I am twenty-something and live in the united states. I love interactive fiction and am trying to learn to make it. I have been practicing using adrift 4 and I’m getting pretty good at it. I have a lot of good ideas that I can’t wait to get down! I love meeting new people and hanging out on forums so I’m happy to be here!
I discovered interactive fiction back around… 2000ish? Some of the ones that stuck with me from then include Photopia, Spider and Web, Ramses, Guilty Bastards, and Sunset Over Savannah.
Then I just drifted more into other things, and finished only a couple works in the intervening years: Bee, Lost Pig, Floatpoint, Violet, The Play, and Guilded Youth are the ones I remember.
I started getting back into really playing them again last year, and I’ve gone back and played some of the ones I missed. The IF Comp 2015 slate was extremely strong, and it’s great to see the variety of stuff coming out now.
So I’ve downloaded, tried and have feedback written for all the IntroComp 2016 entries, and I’m looking forward to discussing and voting on the IF Comp and XYZZY awards this year as well.
Hey everyone! My name is Nicole, I’m 29 (turning 30 this December). I came to love interactive fiction during the summer before my last year of college and again when I was out of work following graduation. I have returned to it thanks to an app on my Android called TextFiction (sadly limiting me to only Z machine games but that’s okay). Some of the games that stayed with me are Party Foul, Anchorhead, and a few others I can’t recall the name of (I woke up an hour ago so…). Glad to be here and hopefully to learn of some new IF games to play! Also in my free time, I’m a writer…mildly published (two poems) and hoping I can one day get out of my own way and get a short story published.
Hello all. My name is Wesley, I am 34. As a programmer I enjoy trying to make small games, some of them completed, others may never be, but all of them are open sourced. I like playing puzzle games, roguelikes and IF. Very recently I started learning Inform, and it’s natural language approach is a refreshing challenge, however rewarding. English is my second language, the first being Afrikaans, which is grammatically similar to Dutch or other Germanic languages, and it makes use of double negatives. And I love eating fruit and veges, and love a great coffee!
Hi. I’m Chin Kee Yong a.k.a. CKY, casual interactive fiction hobbyist. I’m not sure if I’ve introduced myself here before but here I am just in case.
I discovered IF a few years back, and I have some experience with Inform 7, but I only started work on a serious game and began lurking this forum around the time of IFComp 2016. My favorite kind of IF is parser-based narrative-heavy stuff, like most of Emily Short’s portfolio; my favorite work of IF of all time is probably Counterfeit Monkey. I enjoy stories with heavy symbolism and fantastic technology.
Right now, I’m continuing to work on my game, which will hopefully be in a finished state around January. I answer Inform 7 questions in the associated forum from time to time – feel free to ask for help, and I’ll do my best to answer!
I want to say I’m not unique in tha t I’m in my 30’s, and both want to tell stories/make games but I am a team of one so have to work with whatbI have. Well that and there’s this large sense of ‘why bother’ I have to work against.
Anyway hoping to get something done in Twine. Won’t be technically complex if I can keep at it, but the goal is something interesting. Urban fantasy set in a world that tore itself apart, the post apocholyptic wasteland happened, and for the better part of twenty years cities have been trying to tie together. It’s gone from essentially 22nd century technology, to Victorian era with bits of magic here and there.
And you get to look at it all through the eyes of a pawn shop owner that deals in found items from the ‘local’ ruins. The problem is he’s a necromancer, and that’s kindof rather illegal.
I am Jerr, I used live in the Southern US, Louisiana namely. I was introduced to interactive fiction on a IBM Sanyo M550… My mum put it together… I was like 10 when I got to play my first IF title. It was Infocom’s Moonmist. I seemed to find my need to make this kind of gaming. At first I was stuck with a TI-99/4A, with carts of course, such as Alpiner, TI Invaders and Super Demon Attack. There were others, but not too brilliant of an ideal. I also had an NES 8bit, but I think I spent more time with the Sanyo for the hours of play with Moonmist. It was not long then, I was looking a stack of old Compute! magazines that my mum and dad collected since the 80’s, and budget gaming was within this dusty mags, somewhat like today, where you have alot more indie developers making a game to be played on Steam or Itch… But those were the days. Soon I realized I could make these games without having to hard code on BASIC (and that was the extent of my programming due that I learned of C, not really much of C++ and it seemed even arcane even for me as one of the few, if sole programmers in my area) due as we all know, BASIC just wasn’t that good of a deal even those days. I first started with AGT. Got an idea on how to work with the compiler. Then slowly on to ALAN. Oh, Gil, I did buy your fabulous book, Computer Adventures, and played Sir R Hobbes, it was a blast! Thanks for signing it for me, it was when I was in my mid 20’s. Now nearing 40 Fast times!
Hi, I’m Liam from the UK. I’ve been a game developer most of my life, making games in some capacity or other for 20+ years. My first game was The Hobbit, which I never did complete, along with hampstead, colossal adventure and adventure quest.
Fast forward to today and I’m busy building an open world text adventure / roleplaying engine with multiplayer built in called The Adliberum Engine or (ADLENGINE) for short.
Lots of plans to spark some new exciting things into IF, text adventures and roleplaying and I look forward to connecting with you all
Hi, all. Canadian PhD student here in the humanities. Woman, couple years shy of thirty. I’m on the player side of things and not a coder, but boy am I keen on the medium. Favorite game is Spider & Web. I just love parser stuff.
My most memorable IF experience so far is when I managed to make a months-long game of the Muldoon Legacy unwinnable by putting the scarf on the horse during the dream sequence interlude and forgetting it there.
Given that I’m not a creator myself, I hope to help out around here by occasionally beta-testing work, as well as purchasing any commercial parser efforts members of the community draw my attention to.
Hmm. I’ve been around here for a little while, but I never introduced myself. Here goes.
I normally live in Korea, but this calendar year I am in the US on sabbatical. As one of my spare-time hobbies, I’ve decided to pick up IF again. My experience with IF probably began in the early 80s, back when it was called “text adventures.” I remember enjoying it a lot. I was a big reader, so I was used to creating worlds in my mind from words on a page, and although the words in those text adventures tended to be somewhat simpler than many of the books I read, the interaction with the work made up for any narrative shortcomings–I could create my own narratives.
I suppose I moved on from text adventures to hybrid text/graphic adventures (I played a lot of Roberta Williams’ games, for example), CRPGs, and the like. I probably never consciously came to this conclusion, but I guess I assumed that text adventures died out as graphical and general computing capabilities improved. But one day in the mid 90s I somehow stumbled across IF–I think it was the IF Comp that probably first put me back on the trail–and I suddenly got very excited. Here were all those text adventures I used to love, but now they were so much better! I remember playing Spider and Web and having my mind absolutely blown. I played Photopia and, though it wasn’t what I had traditionally associated with “text adventures,” probably cried for the first time ever while playing a game. I got lost in Curses and never really wanted to find my way out again. But I did, and I started messing around with Inform. I got a good way into a game of my own with I6, but then in the late 90s my studies took over my life and IF fell by the wayside.
Fast-forward to this year. Though still busy, I found myself with a little more free time now that I was on sabbatical. My old I6 files were long since gone, but the stories were still in my head. I had dabbled in I7 on and off after it came out, but I never stuck with it. Now, though, I was determined. I have since begun rebuilding one of my old stories in I7, and I have gotten further along than ever before. The project is proving to be more complex than I had originally imagined, but this time I know that I will complete it. It may happen this year, or it may happen next year, but I know that I will finally finish my first game and join the ranks of IF authors. I hope that what I have to offer will be some recompense for everything that I have received from the community over the years.
I guess I’ve been on the boards here for only a few months now, but I can say that I enjoy spending time here, and I’ve found it to be a very helpful and welcoming community. My hope is that someday I will be knowledgeable enough in I7 to give a little back myself.
Fast times! 