Introducing Ourselves

General
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Thanks for the welcome and the helpful replies, there’s certainly a few places for me to check out. I suppose to feel part of the IF community the forum here is a good place to frequent, ClubFloyd sounds interesting I will have to call in there sometime. I’m in the UK so I will definitely be looking into the Adventure Convention it sounds very much like what we used to do, I’d call it ‘group game play’ with teams trying to complete a game within a set time limit. It was back when Scott Adams released his early classic text adventures, we often got to play the games before they were officially published. They were the days, started with Tandy TRS80’s being the most popular computer at our ‘computer club’, my first microcomputer was a BBC Model B with 32K ram, yes a whopping 32K!

With the limited knowledge I have of MUD’s I assume them to be Fantasy worlds with an RPG element. I have to admit I do prefer Sci-Fi to Fantasy, I assume ClubFloyd is more of a meeting place for playing as a group, cooperatively killing monsters then off to the ClubFloyd lounge to sit around chatting after a hard session of IFmud gaming! I’ve no idea really, I will have to go and take a look.

Having had reference made to “old-school” puzzle games has got me intrigued, so are text adventure games now thought of as old style text games and IF as some higher form of literary work and not just simply a game, puzzle or otherwise? When I’m working on my ‘I7 creation’ should I be aware of the need to comply with certain accepted ‘rules of form’ or the genre to classify my imaginary world, or just not worry and be totally free to do whatever I like? I’d prefer to be free rather than constrained by limitations on my imagination and creativity!

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IFmud is really just a chat MUD. I believe players have created the odd quest, but mostly they just hang around in the Lounge and chat. The reason ClubFloyd is held there is because there’s a bot (Floyd, in the Toyshop) which can play IF. Using Floyd makes it easy for everyone joining in a session to see what’s happening and put in their commands.

To a certain extent, yes. You’ll notice that many of the recent works considered “classics” in the community tend to have a more literary focus. On the other hand, a good game won’t be rejected out of hand just because it’s an “old-school” puzzler. (Well, okay, some people will reject it out of hand. Other people, who think IF has become too arty-farty, will be very happy. Most fall somewhere in the middle.) The main problem with releasing a game like that is that the games which get the most attention are those released in the IF Comp, and those are supposed to be no more than two hours long. Releasing a game outside a competition often means it gets less attention, unless it’s by an author with an established reputation. The Spring Thing competition allows games of any length, but doesn’t get as much attention as the IF Comp either.

I have a feeling that more puzzly games are making a bit of a comeback, but it’s usually the shorter but very deeply implemented puzzle games that are the most successful. See for instance Lost Pig, which won the IF Comp and the XYZZY (IF equivalent of an Oscar) for Best Game in 2007, and Suveh Nux, which won the One Room Game competition and the XYZZY for Best Puzzles the same year. Both are mainly focused on puzzles, but because they’re so deeply implemented, being stuck and trying random stuff is as much fun (or more fun!) than actually achieving anything. And (as far as I can remember) there’s no particular penalty for failure in either game, so you can fool about burning things and casting magic spells on random objects to your heart’s content.

In general, there’s more of an expectation of depth these days: if you mention an item in a room description then it should be examinable, NPCs should have replies for reasonable but unnecessary queries, and so on. There’s also a general preference for games which don’t let you get easily into an unwinnable situation (if you’re going to make a game that’s nasty or cruel by Andrew Plotkin’s cruelty scale, it’s best to let players know that up front). Looking at IF Gems, a collection of quotes from IF Comp reviews, will give you an idea of what people tend to look for in an IF game.

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Thanks Emerald, I couldn’t have had a more informative and helpful reply, you’ve covered just about everything!

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Hi…
Well, I’m one of the ”old boys” here. I’m from 1956 which makes me 52 at this time…
My interest in IF started way back in the 80’s when I got my hands on a 48K Spectrum and played “the Hobbit” which was actually high tech back when… :wink:
Soon I bought G.A.C and the Quill and began making my own adventures, pestering friends and family.
When I finally bought a PC I soon discovered Adrift which was just what I needed not having the time or patience to learn a programming language.
On my adventure record I can boast of “Ghost Town” a graphic text adventure.
And I am currently (June 25 2009) working on the game (Through Time)

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Welcome to the forum, Finn! :slight_smile:

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Hello, I’m Paul Lee. I’ve been following IF off and on for several years, although I haven’t participated all that much. I’m now eighteen; when I was fourteen I entered the 2005 Comp with “Dreary Lands.” I’ve also written some reviews for SPAG. I’m what most people would call religious, and I seek to find truth and purpose by faith in Jesus Christ, although I’m aware that I fall far short every day.

I think I was eleven when I first discovered interactive fiction on a CD with a bunch of demo, shareware, and freeware games. There was an application called “Adventure Blaster” that installed a few Inform and TADS games with their Windows interpreters along with a front-end that would launch them and help files with information about IF. I believe among the games included were Theatre by Brendon Wyber, Wearing the Claw by Paul O’Brian, So Far by Andrew Plotkin, and Losing Your Grip by Stephen Granade. There were also a couple other TADS games the titles and authors of which I can’t remember. I loved Wearing the Claw; it was the first IF game I finished, and it’s the game responsible for getting me hooked. :slight_smile:

I decided to join this forum now because I think I’m ready to participate more actively in the IF community. I’ve been writing notes for a game concept that I hope to start coding and writing descriptions for very soon. I hope I finish this project, as the story is particularly close to my heart. Thanks!

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Welcome, Bainespal! :smiley:

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Hello everyone… My name is Manolis and I’m from Greece… I’m 27 and a half years old and I live in Athens…

First of all, I’m very happy that there exists a general (not only inform, adrift etc etc) IF forum, I think it’s the only one (correct my if i’m wrong…)… I found this place from a post on rec.games.int-fiction (or arts maybe?)…

I love gaming in general, but the genres I grew up with and have the best memories are those of Adventures and RPGs(back in the day most adventurers played rpgs too and vice versa, most magazines here had their “hints” pages together for the genres :wink: )… I have spent enough money to have a very good library of games of the above two types of games :slight_smile:

Now, with the today called Interactive Fiction , or Text Adventures as I know them from back then, it all started by a coincidence… I was playing back at the time at my 286 classic adventures, Monkey Island, Quest For Glory, Larry, King’s Quest and one day at the local computer shop I noticed 3 games with similar packaging that caught my eye… They were the “Solid Gold” versions of Zork 1, Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and Leather Godesses of Phobos… I really don’t know how they ended up there since they were already “old” by that time standards, but after i checked them they seemed nice :slight_smile: and their price was good => 3000 drachmes or … 8 euros each by today’s standards… I bought them all and was HOOKED, especially with Zork with it’s classic gameplay of find all the treasures :slight_smile: My english wasn’t that good back then, not they are much better now though ;p but the online hints helped go through all of them… Time passed and the next text adventures i played were the classic shareware ones of pre 1996 era which came on magazines, Unkulian I think, a pc version of the 350 points Collosal Cave / Adventure which started it all…Anyway, more time passed and in 2000 i got internet… I quickly found out about Xyzzynews, Spag, the old page of Stephen Grenade (is it spelled that way?) at about, before brasslantern, and the 2 newsgroup channels… And the IFcomps of course that have been taking place from 1995… It was like a revelation for me, since in just a few days there were so many great things to check…Time passed and I always followed all the news and comps etc etc but never participated actively in discussions in IF things… I even tried to create my own game just for the sake of it, with ALAN which is easy about 6-7 years ago but never finished it… Two(?) or one year back I saw inform transform to a much friendlier language so I will try that one day…

And that’s all about me… Besides IF I always played classic adventures and rpgs (ang games in general…), and have explored vie emulators even those text adventures of the Spectrum era… Those had a raw but strange and nice feeling…

This year I decided to try a lot of Ifcomp games, so I thought this place would be great to come and ask for some hints when stuck (i do get stuck a lot lol :stuck_out_tongue: ) but the biggest thing is that via this forum maybe i’ll stick to it this year and on and follow IF things more closely now… The creation of this forum helps, because imho forums are a much better place for discussion and socializing than the newsgroups channels (I also have my own greek forum about p2p : )…

Ok, that’s all, I hope this time i will follow things more closely and great to find you all and this place :slight_smile:

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Hi, and welcome to the forum!

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Welcome to the forum, ManolisG13! :smiley:

It’s Stephen Granade.

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My name is Alex.

I was reading an issue of Games for Windows (now defunct, >:( angry face) and there was an article about Text Adventures. I found the link to Home of the Underdogs (I miss the old site :cry: ), then the link to some AGI games. Eventually, Interactive Fiction caught my attention.

I started out with Computer Novel Construction Set (a very good but limited (and obscure) program–released 24 years ago), then ADRIFT, then Inform 7. I made some games (The Isolation Series (not released–must rewrite that), and some [unfinished] games, including Crimson Twilight (again, not released–I won’t rewrite it, but i could finish it)).

Currently i’m writing Chimaera Beast, a game based on a story I trid two implement twice already. Both times it failed, but this game will be short (The first chapter in a series), so I guess i’ll finish it.

Meaby today.

PS: Galatea roxors

PS.2: Inform 7 for Linux noms my RAM :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry:

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I’m still somewhat new to IF. I also first learned of it via The Underdogs site in 2006. I downloaded Glowgrass, Lash, Photograph etc and rather liked them. After entering college there’s been a long stretch of not playing much, but now my attention has returned. I might be slightly younger than the average IF fan…21?

Outside IF, my main interests are otaku/moe culture, transhumanism, and political science.

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Welcome to the forum, Eudoxia and linger! :smiley:

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Hi all.

My name is Marco Innocenti, Italian, age 37.
I’m a literal “text adventure”-maniac since when I was barely born, in the early '80s, when I used to play IF on my C64. I still drool at the thought of The Hobbit, Gruds in Space and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Since then, i never really left the house of IF.

I tried authoring IF (I’m quite the kind who tries to author everything, from actual fiction to music to arts) back in the I6 days. I found myself frustrated by the lack of competence in advanced programming and of time to dedicate to such a task.

Now, with the awesome I7 up and running, I’m back in the “business” again. I feel I can do something more than a three-room exercise with no puzzle at all. Hope you will hear more from me. The only handicaps I must now rub away are my highly deformed english-writing (that due to the fact I played MMORPGS for the last 8 years thus transforming with time every “can’t” in a “cant” and every “you” in a “u”… a bad habit that is now hard to remove) and my not-so-good english.

In the meanwhile, I will look at this forum with love in my eyes.
Be prepared, for I am a very verbal man :slight_smile:

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Welcome to the forum, Marco! :wink:

Do you know that an Italian-language IF community exists? Sure, if you write IF in Italian, you’ll have a far smaller audience than in English… But it might still be worth it, especially if you’re not very good in English. I think Inform 7 was translated into Italian, but I’m not quite sure (was it only an incomplete version?) – anyway, it’s possible to translate it.

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Yes, I tested it. There are two reasons why I’d rather do an imperfect english IF than an italian one.

  1. The Ita-IF is almost perfect, a job very well done. Too bad, at the moment, it lives on the basics of the english version, thus providing aberrations in the syntax that I find very hard to get corrected, or digested. I.e.: eng > “it’s part of the door”; ita > “è parte di la porta” while the correct use would be “è parte della porta”.

  2. The second reason has more sentimental roots: for me, as opposed to all the others IF-players i know, IF is in english. IF is Infocom, Level9, Magnetic Scrolls, Scott Adams. And now: Gentry, Plotking, Short etc. During the ages (moreso, in the times when IF was a trend, here in Italy) some magazine came out with many, many adventures that, altho funny and well written, lacked the spirit of true IF: they were a collection of cul-de-sacs, a room with a puzzle following the next until the end. The prose itself was puzzle oriented and never-ever much evocative. That, weighted with the far more interesting Infocom games (and — why not — with the fact that a foreign language has always much more appeal), turned me into a non-lover. So: to me, reading/writing “the cave is immersed in the pale glowing of the moon, filtering from the opening in the ceiling” has much more appeal than “la caverna è immersa nel pallido baluginìo della luna, che filtra dall’apertura nel soffitto.” That’s all.

By the way: my english is not that bad :slight_smile:
My big problem is that I’m quite a nice writer in Italian, and I tend to use similar phrase-construction that the one I use in italian. This, often, brings me to hard-to-compose sentences, infinite periods, cranky text.

Nothing, I hope, that a good beta tester wouldn’t correct in no time.

Anyway, I still think about IF as an hobby (my mistake!). This means no one will hang me by the sacred ones if i build up something below the average quality.

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Awesome, welcome to the forums Keltena :slight_smile:

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Welcome to the new generation of IF authors! :smiley: (I mean Keltena, of course.)

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Ah… I remember pouring over the Inform Designer’s Manual over and over again when I was 12-13-14 years old, determined to learn Inform to write my own game. I was so excited to be able to enter the IF Competition! I felt the way I imagine a kid who loves baseball would feel if he were able to play a game with the Yankees. When I think about it, I still feel awed about having entered the Comp, even considering my lackluster buggy little game, which I’m patronizingly fond of. :smiley:

Welcome, Melanie, and keep at it!

I hope we can bring uphold the honor of our hobby as the torch is passed!

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Well, this might as well be my first post there.

ahem So, hello there. I’m a Portuguese 23-year old adventure game afficionado. I’m broad-minded enough to accept any form and/of hybrid of the adventure game genre, but my heart is still set in the traditional adventure game and IF. The reason I prefer IF is because of the unlimited possibilites it gives to the player; the reason I keep going back to the graphical games is because the strength of multimedia is unarguable, and a powerful way to create atmosphere and an emotional connection with the player when done right. Such as there are things IF can do that graphical games never will, so there are things in multimedia that plain text can’t achieve.

But I rant - apologies. I’ve dabbled in AGS, and I’ve dabbled in Inform 7. Currently I’ve stopped dabbling, because I realized I’m more of a player than an author.

I like to understand what makes games good, or what makes some games fall short of their potential. I do this with simply my experience of adventuring - I have played pretty much every major adventure game released, with the exception of some more recent titles which don’t interest me much anyway, and am alphabetically going through my archive of downloaded IF - all the IF I could find everywhere. I’m a bit of a packrat, and I may be a bit obsessive. But ah well, no one’s completely normal. I put down my opinions in my reviews, although I only review a game when I have something to add, something that hasn’t been said already.

I’ve very high standards for a playing experience, because I believe that adventure games and IF not only have the potential to be great and grand entertainment, they also can be true art forms. I’ve grown rather picky as a result, but I can still appreciate the good qualities in an overall lesser game. I also can’t be bothered to play a game that disappoints me in the first couple of turns, not with so many great games out there.

Every day I check RAIF, RGIF, IFDB and the ADRIFT page for more posts and any mentions of new games. Now I’ll start checking INTFICTION as well. :slight_smile: