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Indeed!
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Hi, I thought Iād quickly (re-)introduce myself here before posting. In the past few months I read several posts on here to which I wanted to reply, but it always felt strange because I felt some people would wonder who I am, and some would wonder where Iāve been.
Some of you will remember me (with mixed feelings, I imagine) from way back, long before this forum existed, as a regular contributor to many aspects of Interactive Fiction at that time: Iāve written a game (Ralph, in 1996), Iāve participated in discussions on mailings lists and the Usenet newsgroups, Iāve provided much feedback to several projects, I used to be on ifMUD almost every day. With many of you I had personal discussions via e-mail.
I never really lost interest in IF, but from a certain point on, I just didnāt have enough time to actively participate, and as these things go my activities shifted to other areas. Lately, though, Iāve taken steps to making a living talking about old games, at first on YouTube, then I started studying again in order to take up Computer Game Studies and hopefully write a thesis on that subject in a couple of years.
Itās a bit weird to see that this topic that Iām replying to right now was started 17 years ago, a mere 3 or 4 years after I stopped contributing, but I also like how this kind of mirrors my re-emerging. In any case, I hope to be a little more active again, though probably not on a regular basis just yet. But itās nice to be back, even with just one post.
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Hi, Iām Winter, author of an interactive story (as well as other non-interactive fiction). I write scifi, cyberpunk, and fantasy centered on trans and autistic characters. It could be nice to step out of my little world and be connected to the broader community of interactive fiction.
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Hi!!! Iām Horror/nameless/Ephe/etc. etc.
My personal experience with IF over the years has been stuff like Twine (a while ago, both reading and writing) as well as a few other odds and ends. Anchorhead was the big one for me, and acts as my strongest connection to IF as most conceptualize the medium. In fact, thinking about Anchorhead again was what brought me here! Other than that, I suppose some past experience with Nethack might count a bit as well as time with old flash games.
Aside from that, Iām a big fan of games in general. That includes both āvideoā and ātabletopā. My favourite tabletop games are all Jenna Moran fare (so your Nobilis-es, your Glitches, Chuuboās and the like). Videogame-wise Iām mostly about RPGs with an emphasis on the story (so Wild Arms 3 and Library of Ruina are a couple of personal favourites). In terms of overarching genres, Iām huge on horrorā¦ which I suppose is pretty fitting given the userhandle.
I am a writer first and foremost, and have several things in the ever-expanding pipelineā¦ but they are admittedly EXTREMELY SECRET. The most I can say is they match those previously-mentioned preferences and tend towards a focus on alienation. Still, itās nice to be around and to have gotten help figuring out my issues setting up Inform 7!!!
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Welcome! I have personally found this forum delightfully helpful with my numerous technical questions.
@Winter
I love sci-fi, cyberpunk, and fantasy stuff so I look forward to seeing what youāre working on.
@EphemeralHorror
Anchorhead is probably my favorite text adventure Iāve played. Have you tried The King of Shreds and Patches? Itās long, but very goodā¦ Lovecraft meets Shakespeare.
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I havenāt! But Iāll definitely try to keep that in mind. Could you tell I enjoy Lovecraftian things?
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You may be interested in a list @mathbrush made called A timeline of Lovecraftian horror. Iāve only played a few games from the list, but Iāve got most of them downloaded and waiting for the right moment to dig in.
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Oh I will DEFINITELY have to keep that one in mind, too.
The nice thing about not keeping up with IF for a while is that you come back to so, so much!
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Oh, totally. Iāll never ever catch up. Iāve played what feels to me like a lot of interactive fiction and have only ever played a two Infocom games, and probably less than five Twine-type choice-based games. Thereās so much out there. Which is great!
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Hi, my name is PaweÅ. When I was young(er) I wanted to be a writer, but I ended up being a programmer instead. Now Iām old but few years ago I figured out that interactive fiction might be a good way to connect these two and Iāve been kind of lurking since then.
Not being a writer, I mostly find the writing side of IF difficult - how to start, keep the reader engaged, how to use interactivity to keep them interested, not frustrated etc. This forum is so far the best resource I found for these problems, all other seem to concentrate on a technical side.
One thing Iām quite sure about is that Iām mostly interested in choice-based, mutable stories and alike, not parser-based. The reason is that I believe parser games only work for English and if Iām ever going to write something, in wonāt be in English.
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Why? Do you mean because of program limitations (e.g. Inform mostly only supports the English language)?
Now I have no idea if thatās true or not because I havenāt made a parser game before (yet), but someone else with more experience might be able to elaborate.
Iām curious, what language would it be then?
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The name, espcially with the special āLā letter, looks like Pawel (sorry, Iām not sure how to write this final letter with my keyboard) is Polish.
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@souppilouliouma is right, Iām Polish
Why? Do you mean because of program limitations (e.g. Inform mostly only supports the English language)?
I mostly mean the language itself. English has some traits that make it very friendly for parser games. To give an example: lamp is always a lamp. No matter is āa lamp is standing on the tableā or you āget lampā, or you ālook closer at the lampā, or you ātake a light bulb from the lampā. In Polish it would be, respectively, ālampa stoi na stoleā, āweÅŗ lampÄā, āprzyjrzyj siÄ lampieā, āweÅŗ żarĆ³wkÄ z lampyā. Itās not impossible to model this, but itās order of magnitude harder. And current tooling does not really support it.
I remember playing some MUD years ago, which was intended to be completely localized into Polish. And it was. When you created your character you had to provide all 7 grammatical cases of your name 
And the overall feeling of interacting with the world was often clunky anyway.
I can imagine having a good parser experience in Spanish or maybe Chinese, but for many languages is unachievable, unless we have NLP models that are small and fast enough to fit on the mobile phone of in userās browser. This is mostly why Iām not really looking into parser games, in short.
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Hello! My name is Jonathan Hays and Iām a big fan of IF. Being Gen X, I grew up on the classic CYOA novels and text adventure games on my C64. I have always been fascinated by the potential of IF, and have even been fortunate enough to release a couple IF games previously.
To that end, Iām one of the founders of Silverpine Software, and we are currently developing a number of IF titles that we hopefully will release towards the end of 2023. This is our third go-around creating an IF platform, however this time we are trying to be smarter about it: we are building the IF engine separately from the games. The new authoring environment is called Evergreen.ink, and it draws on our knowledge and experience from our previous attempts. Our goal is to open this up to everyone, and weāve already started doing a small external alpha with some great feedback. For those wondering, the focus of Evergreen.ink is to author content designed for reading on a mobile device with a very easy to use set of authoring controls.
Anyway, I love talking about all things IF so please hit me up if youād like to chat.
Cheers!
-Jonathan
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Hello folks! Iām Gary, usually with the username SuperBiasedGary on pretty much any other site I have a presence on.
Iāve always been a big fan of games and writing, have noodled around a lot on both since I was a teen, experimenting a lot and making unfinished prototypes in game jams.
My day job is programming tools for an animation studio in Ireland but in the last couple years I have gotten a lot deeper into actively finishing my games. I read through all of Umineko in 2020, which was a huge VN made with a tiny team. And suddenly made it clear how achievable games could be if I made more of a specific effort to finish them.
Looking forward to checking out other peopleās exciting work and sharing some of my own!
Cheers,
Gary
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Hey Perry, good to have you here!
I wonder if your thesis is available online somewhere?
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Thanks! Seeing as the thesis was published under my real name (and is also in German, making it irrelevant for the majority of people here), Iād rather not share a link here ā but Iāve sent you a PM.
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Hello! Iām Noseflautist!
For the last two years, Iāve entered a game in the Inkjam on itch.io, building games almost entirely in Ink (some friends of mine had ways of adding images that I did not fully understand).
The first time we came 4th overall with āBekant T. Blanc and the Meteor of Doomā, and 2nd place in Narration:
And last year we came 2nd overall with āMidelle and the Blessings Gone Wrongā, and 1st place in Narration:
That is me gloating, but mostly Iām doing it because I want you all to play my games! Itās promotion.
ANYWAY
Iām excited to be here, looking to learn how to use other systems to make games besides Ink, as Ink doesnāt do EXACTLY what weāre trying to make it do.
Iād love a system that spends most of the time giving players choosable options instead of the parser-type that asks players to type things in, as I find Iām usually typing in words that the game doesnāt understandā¦
Does anyone have recommendations?
If Iām designing a game where you can go back and forth around a map and talk to people in many places, sometimes with new information / tools to solve puzzles, what system would you use and why?
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