Introducing Ourselves

Yep, you were approved and I see your post. We screen people in the door.

And welcome!

TL;DR: IF is pretty cool.

By way of introduction, Iā€™ve been casually dipping into a lot of interactive fiction over the last year or so and Iā€™ve come to the conclusion that IF is pretty cool and varied. There is such a wealth of material out there! And even though I pretty much stick to choice-based IF, thereā€™s enough work available to last me quite a while.

Recently Iā€™ve read The Periwink, by Jedediah Berry; Cape, by Bruno Dias; Utopian Jam, by Astrid Dalmady; Stone Harbor, by Eliza Daly; Birdland, by Brendan Patrick Hennessey; and Bring Me a Head, by Chandler Groover, as a few examples. These are all free, high-quality works in my opinion. It took a little sifting to find them, and I also make a little fetish out of trying to read on my smartphone, so that limits me.

But even with that limitation, youā€™ve got commercial entities like Choice of Games, Delight Games, Inkle Studios, and Tin Man Games putting out a ton of materialā€“most of it pretty reasonably priced in my opinionā€“that can be read/played on mobile. Iā€™ve tried many books from these guys and the diversity is really amazing! Iā€™ve particularly got to take my hat off to COG for promoting gender and sexual diversity in their stories.

Iā€™ve also enjoyed perusing sub-Q and textadventures.co.uk, for other free reads, so it would be hard to say there isnā€™t enough material!

Iā€™ve only come around to IF recently, so Iā€™m not a grizzled veteran of parser based works. Iā€™ve tried it, including the old Infocom titles, but Iā€™m not so good at it, and I actually got lost playing Zork with a walkthrough and had to stop, so thatā€™s pretty bad! But I am itching to read, for example, Hadean Lands.

In short, even with the limitations imposed by my taste, or how and where I want to read, the field is pretty rich, in my opinion. Every day, I always look forward to see whatā€™s coming out and what looks interesting. So, the newbie sez: ā€œso far, IF is pretty cool.ā€

Welcome, dsphelps!

Glad to hear you discovered IF, and all the different varieties. The current trend is toward more accessible works, and I know Zarf put a ton of thought into making Hadean Lands one of the best examples of accessible parser games with its map and meta commands, but still keeping it full of challenges. Good luck!

Hi IF community, nice to meet you! :slight_smile:

Iā€™ve been a long-time lurker on the intfiction forums as well as many other IF-related places. Iā€™m primarily a web developer and Iā€™ve been interested in playing and authoring interactive fiction for many years.

I guess what fascinates me most about text-based games, and IF in particular, is the sheer endless possibilities it gives to authors. In a world where even most indie games are developed by teams, IF allows one person to develop a game by focusing on the story and/or the gameplay instead of the often very time-consuming creation of game assets.

I plan to enter this yearā€™s IFComp with a game written in my own engine. The engine is currently in the last stages of a major rewrite and Iā€™ll probably tell you guys more about it once I deem it ready for public consumption. As a teaser: The engine is open source and is meant to enable authors to write ā€œparserless text adventuresā€ as well as choice-based/hypertext works with a very simple but flexible world model.
Iā€™d say the interface it provides for games is a mixture of Ink, Lifeline, Visual Novels and Twine, and its focus is on usability (for the player). Exporting games as stand-alone websites (mobile-friendly) and as desktop apps for windows, mac and linux is as easy as writing two words on the terminal.

My favourite works of IF include Sorcery!, Tin Star, Birdland, Photopia, 16 Ways To Kill A Vampire At McDonalds and Their Angelical Understanding.

I sometimes think that as a player/reader of IF I might be a little odd in that I much prefer IF works that lean more towards the game side than the literary side, while Iā€™m not exactly a big fan of the parser as an interface, which seems to be what most game-y IF works use. Seeing how Detectiveland won the comp last year, Iā€™m curious to see how many games this year will follow in its footsteps.

Sounds cool! I look forward to trying your game.

Hey gang!

I just joined up and wanted to say hello. Iā€™ve been a big fan of IF since, well, computers. Iā€™m also an audio book narrator, and realized these are two great tastes that (hopefully) taste great together! Iā€™d been wanting to stream Visual Novels while narrating them, but this is a much better fit. Get the Twitch audience to play along and help me figure out what to doā€¦ and then perhaps put together a podcast with complete narrated works.

Iā€™ll be writing a separate post for that so I donā€™t hijack this welcome thread.

Anyway, nice to meet everyone!

-C

Welcome, Crifmer!

There has been some activity with regard to streaming or ā€œletā€™s-playā€-ing interactive fiction. Lynnea Glasser has streamed gameplay on Twitch, and I know MTW has made some talk-through video walkthroughs of the openings pure text games. ā€œClash of the Type-insā€ is also an audio podcast about playing through IF that is buoyed by the charisma and humorous interplay of the hosts and is a quasi-interview with noted IF personalities. ā€œEaten by a Grueā€ is another audio podcast that discusses classic Infocom games, even though they donā€™t actually play-through them on the air.

VNs probably are a lot more video-friendly, witness all the ā€œDream Daddyā€ letā€™s-plays going on at the moment.

Hi, iā€™m Andrea, age 28 and iā€™m living in Rome (Italy).

I played Zork for the first time 2 years ago, I immediately knew it was love.

Now I try to make some IF with inform7 and want to make music for IF (Iā€™m a composer and guitar play) , I hope to show you some soon. :slight_smile:

Welcome, Andrea! I too was a huge fan of Infocom back in the day and it was magical when I discovered there was a way to make games exactly like it!

Hello, Iā€™m Florencia, though I usually go by Flo. I write over at Tea-Powered Games and do my own small side projects, most of which are games of some kind. I like trying out new tools (Iā€™m playing with Ink now) and making bits of art to go with my words.

This is my first year entering the IFComp, Iā€™m looking forward to it!

Nice to meet everyone!

Welcome, Florencia!

I certainly want to know what that gene in bakerā€™s yeast does!!

Thanks!

Well, it might affect trafficking of some proteins (or maybe their export). I donā€™t think it was interesting enough for other people to have continued the work, so that might be its entire legacy.

I just like bread!

Hi. Iā€™m Slim.
Started in 2003, still working on the same game through multiple builds. Sorry for asking for help and bothering you guys I do alot of coding,
and have been back and forth between raising five kids alone and working full time two jobs.

Welcome Slim! Please do feel free to ask for as much help as you wantā€“we love that stuff!

Hi my name is Blare, handsome, cool, and kind. Sorry nvm the adjectives!
haha. Iā€™m Gemini, a simple person with a complicated mind!

Hi, Iā€™m Cheryl/ccsdgā€¦ long time casual IF player but resisted jumping down the rabbit hole until now. Iā€™m a homeschooling mum by day but design and paint stuff on the side. I also used to be a web developer. I came here wondering whether IF authors ever needed artists? And what kind?

Hello everybody ! Iā€™m a 37 years old French from Bordeaux !
Iā€™m using Twine since a couple of years !

I really like creating little RPG games withs save system, improving level and curingā€¦
Thereā€™s still a lot of things I have to master with Twine but itā€™s worth programming with it .

A bientƓt sur le forum / See you soon on this Forum :wink:

Salut Pottoka !

Did you know there is a French IF community?
We have a forum too and a Discord server, so come whenever you want!

Hello! Another new one here. The first IF I played I had to load from a cassette tape. I missed the IF revival in the 90s and 00s until 2010 or so, then played often (I suck at parser), and Iā€™ve been doing Twine for a couple of years now. I finally released a story for last Ectocomp and Iā€™m working on a largish game for IFcomp. Iā€™m a regular at the Euphoria chatroom.