Heyyo y’all. I’m óvi. A brazilian gal who loves to read all kinds of stuff.
I’m not quite sure how I ended up here but it probably was through Emily Short. I probably was reading about narrative design and somehow found her blog. That sounds about right!
The first IF game I played was Galatea. I was pretty much sold in this whole IF thing right then there. Since then I have played quite a few other IFs although far from the amount I want to!
At first I got a little bit fascinated with parser-based games and wanted to make them but quickly realized that it would be kinda cumbersome since I write in Portuguese and then translate it to English. That plus the fact that I want to share my games with my fellow countrymen.
Currently I’m going through Porpentine’s catalog. Her writing makes me feel all sorts of things and trying to write about it feels like a challenge of its own… you could say I’m having a pretty good time with it. Earlier today I played CYBERQUEEN.
I’ve been writing stuff for a while now. I started out really young with a mix of SNSD yuri fanfiction, Last Airbender-based comics and unfinished giant-scoped RPG Maker 2003 games. Not much published work to speak of. I used to(still have) pretty bad publishing anxiety.
I hope to be an (somewhat)active participant of this lovely community ^~ Currently, I am working on two Twine games simultaneously that fingers crossed will be published soon enough.
Hi, I’m Mari from Finland. I’ve recently rediscovered interactive fiction and I’m looking forward to reading/playing more. I wish to write some IF once I have more experience with the medium. I have lots of cool ideas, but actually making them work is the hard part. I’d also like to experiment with how to make IF more accessible for those who have different disabilities.
Hi all! I’m Sara, a writer who’s active in the SFF short fiction scene. I read submissions for speculative genre magazines and the like. Been interested in interactive fiction for a while! I like thinking about stories, and the construction of stories, a lot.
Recently got into Porpentine’s stuff via reading Emily Short’s blog. Been thinking about my takeaways from bingeing Porpentine so far: day-based mechanisms pointing at abjection under capitalism, the human/animal/machine trichotomy, systemic violence manifesting in the personal, disability and transgression, using choice to ensnare the player in complicity. I really liked her works With Those We Love Alive,skulljhabit, howling dogs, and The True Legend of Tails Prower. Maybe I should compile some more of my thoughts here!
Other IF games I’ve liked: Horse Master by Tom McHenry, growth by Liz England, Bogeyman by Elizabeth Smyth. Games where I’ve enjoyed the writing: A Dark Room, Disco Elysium, The Last Door (developed by The Game Kitchen).
I also software engineer, sometimes. My experience with games has been mediated by disability, so I choose not to play games that require button mashing / quick reactions / repetitive movements / heavy typing. For that reason I appreciate Twine games especially.
Emily Short → Porpentine → submit your own game to EctoComp. Great sequence there!
I’ll be on the lookout for Mothman Test. On the EctoComp Submissions page.
Which opens in an hour and 36 minutes!
(People, we need more days in the year. Soon we’ll just have a year-long IFEctoSeedFrenchSpringTalpParserComp with numerous jams sprinkled on top. But I digress…)
I can only wish you the best of luck on that front! It isn’t much, but recently I’ve been dealing with the inclusion of Ascii art/images in my own work along with trying to add options to toggle/include image descriptions so I already know how even the smallest things on this front can sometimes turn out to be an uphill battle. Still! Sounds like you’re certainly up to the effort.
You’re just making me wanting to replay Disco Elysium. Again. Ehe.
Glad to have you here! Best of luck with your efforts, as well!!!
Hi all! I’m Aidrian (or Fae), I use they/them pronouns.
I’m a fiction writer that started writing interactive stories as a path into video game writing. I have a lot of love for dark fiction, horror, romance, and interactive narratives.
I guess I first became aware of the genre through text adventures like Zork, but didn’t find my way into writing it myself until I became aware of Choice of Games. My first ever attempt was actually a parser game, but I didn’t find that the inherent pacing and mechanics of the parser fit my concept or style of narrative. Maybe I’ll come back to it someday, but for now I’m happy appreciating parsers from the player side.
I write in Twine now, and have released a demo for my first large project. Until I figure out the next update for that, I’m working on a couple of small games for ShuffleComp and SeedComp, which I’m really looking forward to sharing.
Hello, Eric O’Dell here. My history is that I grew up playing Infocom games, and then spent some time the two IF-related Usenet newsgroups in the mid-90s. I was a TADS user back when it was shareware; I still have the manual and its diskette on my bookshelf. I also wrote a UI for playing an introductory bunch of games called Adventure Blaster, which some oldbies may remember.
Other than playing and writing games, my main interest was implementing an IF development library in a general purpose language. C or C++ would have been my choice back then, but I wasn’t yet remotely a good enough programmer at that time. Twenty-five years later, I’m thinking about doing it in JavaScript using Electron.js as the user interface.
I notice that a lot of the old development systems are still in use in updated versions, in addition to several platforms I’ve never heard of, which warms my heart.
So what have the biggest developments in IF been since the mid- to late 90s? I know I’ve missed a bunch!
Personally?
Chandler Groover’s Eat Me, this year’s IFComp (29th Annual), and of course, Emily Short’s breakthrough (Counterfeit Monkey)! See all on ifdb.org .
hi there. I’m Thad. I go by she/they pronouns. I’m sorta new to using forums. I’ve had a fluctuating interest in IF (though I knew it as ‘text adventures’) for a good few years. I don’t really have too too much experience playing them, but I’ve always thought they’d be a fantastic format for telling stories, and lo and behold, the modern community for it is oriented towards that.
I’ve always liked writing, and for a while, I got involved in some small roleplay communities among friends. Longterm, I want to make a story-centric platformer game using game maker studio, and right now I’m using inform as a tool to test out solely the narrative of the intro map of the game. That game won’t be for a good while, though, and I’m definitely going to do a lot with this language in the meantime.
I’m an amateur digital artist, drawing and painting stuff; and i’m a very amateur programmer, rustily familiar with QBASIC, familiar with the basics of GMS2, and learning the basics of c++.
Besides the major things others mentioned, TADS held steady for a few years, then dropped away, but has had several really good games in the last few years.
You missed all of Emily Short, who came into prominence in 2000. She has been simultaneously one of the most popular authors, one of the most prominent reviewers, one of the most prolific tool developers, and perhaps the best community organizer, although for the last few years most of those things have taken a back seat to commercial work. Her game Counterfeit Monkey is the most popular game on ifdb.
Speaking of which, IFDB.org is the current most popular place for people around here to find interactive fiction games. There is also CASA, which has better coverage of old 80s games, textadventures.co.uk, which gets a lot more traffic but less discussion, and sites that predominantly favor choice-based games like itch.io or choiceofgames.com.
Choice based games have generally been accepted now. Every few years there are disputes where some people say they’re not real IF, and the IF community splits in half, but the ‘no choice-based games’ half usually disappears or comes back. There’s only a couple of people around right now who are staunchly anti-choice. There are some truly amazing choice-based games out there, you can see some here: Search for Games
You probably saw Zarf around in the mid-to-late 90s; he released his biggest game about a decade ago called Hadean Lands which is about using alchemy, and has a lot of similarities to programming in the way alchemy is implemented.
Other things you missed were Jon Ingold (author of Mulldoon Legacy) winning a lot of awards and then going on to found an IF company called Inkle which has won a ton of awards. It and another company called Choice of Games focus on choice-based games.
There were some extremely popular games that came out in the mid 2000’s that focused a lot on character point of view and voice. You could check out Lost Pig or Violet as the most famous examples.
Although parser gaming is already retro gaming, there is an even more retro community that yearns for either the old 8-bit graphic games or games that run on tiny old computers. Adventuron is a platform that supports the old-style graphics; you can see some here: Search for Games
and some games made with ‘punyinform’ to run on retro platforms:
Another person worth checking out is Ryan Veeder, who popularized an easy-going, almost absurdist style of game with fancy text effects. You can see his games here: Search for Games
The top game was a collaboration between 80 authors to celebrate Anchorhead’s 20th anniversary.
There are a lot more things that happened, like limited parser games and Andrew Schultz’s wordplay games, but those are the ones I can think of!
Hello all, I’m Citrus and my pronouns are She/They. I am a 2000s/2010s kid, which kind of puts me out of the old school IF communities of the 90s and prior, but I still enjoy playing and specially creating my own.
My hobbies revolve mostly around art and graphic design, tho my main computer is out of business, so I’m now mostly focusing on text and pixel art stuff. Looking forwards to put those skills to work with a game or something along those lines.
Currently, I don’t have any projects that I feel are good enough to share, but who knows what the future might hold. It has been quite a long time since I was in a forum of this sort, so I’m looking forward to participating here!
In all fairness, we have folks from 14-80 here, and that’s only those I know of. If you enjoy IF and expressing yourself creatively, you can definitely be at home here.
Pixel art sounds like a match made in Heaven with Adventuron. Just saying… it’s so cozy in this retro parser engine. So many blocky, gorgeous pixels. All the cool kids are using it. Even the fonts are pixelicious. You don’t want to be left out now, do ya?
Hi there! You can call me Bex, or hey you! I really like writing choose your own adventure fanfics. I think I make them pretty thorough and fun. I’m curious to play around with trying more methods since I’ve always made them the same way. Thanks!
