I’m John Francis, and I’ve been a big fan of IF for almost two decades now. I like a lot of classic stuff - I’m massive fan of Infocom, Adam Cadre, Emily Short and Jon Ingold - but other than a few appearances on ifMUD over the years I’ve been too shy to join the community until recently.
I stopped playing much IF in college, but I’ve rediscovered my love for it during quarantine (specifically, Arthur DiBianca’s games as well as The Wizard Sniffer brought me back into it).
After all this time, I’m really excited to finally become a part of the community whose works have given me so much joy. I also am learning Inform 7 now, and hope to become an author this year!
I also just downloaded I7 a few weeks ago. I’m still looking for good resources - someone on ifMUD recommended me chapter 8 of the Inform 6 manual as a primer on game design, and I’ve found it very helpful.
I’m Autumn (she/her), and I’m a millennial I guess. I started getting into IF some years ago, mostly via visual novels, especially Hanako Games and Christine Love’s stuff, as well as Choice of Games. I got into Twine right as the “early 2010s queer twine scene” was starting to fracture; some of its products were really meaningful for me personally. I haven’t participated in any communities around IF until recently because of anxiety or something like that, but I’m trying to put myself more out there.
In terms of writing, I’m really interested in storylet-based systems (largely thanks to Bee and Emily Short’s blog), and how we can use interaction mechanics to improve storytelling. I’ve been working with the dendry platform by fixing bugs and adding features (and I’ve made what is probably the only game specifically for that platform). But so far most of my stuff have been slice-of-life/personal stories without much in terms of new mechanics (I’m trying to branch out… eventually).
I’ve been writing a bunch of reviews on ifdb lately (I’m autumnc), mostly to procrastinate from doing actual work. As well as adding a bunch of games to ifdb (I’m not sure if some games entirely fit as IF though?). I’m interested in trying to preserve twine works from the aforementioned early 2010s scene; even though it wasn’t long ago, there are so many works that seem to have just disappeared from the web (RIP dropbox and google drive hosting).
Hi, I’m Katie, I’m 20 and I got interested in IF playing point-and-click games, and Zork, with my dad. I liked it so much that I failed to write my own game a couple of times. Then last year I discovered the Interactive Fiction Database, and got excited about all the games. Now I’m messing around with writing a game again. We’ll see how that goes.
Welcome! This is a good time to hop on, there are a lot of cool competitions with games coming out soon.
Spring Thing is starting up April 2nd, and it’s the 2nd-biggest competition of the year, should have some great games if it’s anything like other years.
Around the same time is the Text Adventure Literacy Jam, an itch jam focused on kid-friendly, 2-word, retro parser games. So far it looks like 47 people have signed up!
Later in the summer is Parsercomp, showcasing parser games, and Introcomp, which only accepts incomplete games and encourages people to finish them by giving cash prizes.
Finally, in the fall, there’s IFComp, the biggest competition of the year, and Ectocomp, which is for horror/spooky games and has a division for games made in 4 hours or less.
Besides playing, these could be fun to enter, too. If you’re trying to get a game finished, Introcomp and Ectocomp are great ways to get feedback on unfinished or small games. Or if you make something great and want to share it, you could put it in one of the later competitions.
Nevermind mathbrush, he’s just eager to see as many games as possible in the competitions to satiate his never-ending review-hunger.
(Check out his list of reviews on IFDB. Great for some guidance on what games to play, whatever your preferred style of IF)
IFDB is an immense sea of text-games. Dive in, enjoy, get to know IF from every angle.
And if you want help with creating your game or would like some recommendations for great games, there’s lots and lots of helpful people here.
Welcome to Interactive Fiction. This is a great forum to discuss your ideas and get help if you ever need it. The gurus here are always willing to pitch in if you have any stumbling blocks.
@mathbrush - I don’t think I’ll get anything done by April but I love Halloween, so I’ll totally try to do something for Ectocomp. And Introcomp sounds like a really neat idea.
@rovarsson - I will definitely look that up. I looked over the Crime and Heist games briefly, and I wish I had time to play all of them.
And I will definitely use this forum to get help on making games, because I’m still figuring out how Inform works, so I’m sure to run into trouble.
Hello, I’m Dyskos. I’m 25 years old, living in Austin, Texas.
While many people might reminisce about the days of booting Zork I on their parent’s old C64 at 4 years old, I became interested in retro-gaming after realizing my laptop for college wasn’t powerful enough to play League of Legends. Probably just as well, because I hate the game anyway.
My journey started with games like Doom and Quake, with Blood, Daggerfall, and Morrowind being my favorite games. Eventually, I looked into the earliest computer games created and came across the rich history of Interactive Fiction such as Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork. Ever since then, I’ve had a great fascination with IF – parser games in particular and the kind of freedom one has with systems like that.
I’m currently learning Alan 3 and hope to write something of my own in the future. I’m glad to be a part of this community!
