Introducing Ourselves

Ooops, sorry, I thought it was a general request and not specific to one post, forget about it.

Hey persons!
I’m new to the whole scene, but I like it’s inclusive and diverse voices.
The UI choices on this website are astounding! A brief moment of confusion is clarified by a minute attention to detail.

I really like how inclusivity transfers over to the overall design.

Not much I can really say about me other than I like the internet, programming and games like Interactive Fiction. Learning about old sierra games brought me here. I just loooove me some text adventures and internet history. It makes me want to make my own. Everyone I know thinks of games on a big budget, but I like to think of it like escaping reality. Like curling up into a good book and forgetting about the world at large, that’s what I’m truly after. IF does that. Night in the Woods, Grim Fandango, Sam and Max. Maybe I’ll be able to finish one and share it with the persons from here.
Thanks for stopping by!

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Welcome to the forum!

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Hello, everyone!

I love stories in basically any form they come in and I’ve been meaning to learn how to create interactive fiction for a while now. I didn’t have much access to games in my youth, and so I often feel like I am out of the loop or desperately playing catch up. At the same time, it’s nice to always learn about something new I should try.

Right now I’m teaching myself Twine and I’ve been reading up on ChoiceScript. I’ve also used a bit of Ren’Py. Neo-Twiny Jam is my motivation to finally start. I have a few longer things I’ve been working on here and there, and I hope to start dedicating more time to these projects now that I feel like I’ve taken the first minuscule step.

Thank you for having me!

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Hey all! I’ve been a lurker on here for a long time but seeing as I’m close-ish to releasing my first game in inform, I’d like to introduce myself! My name is Anders, I’m a college student studying computer science and Chinese language, but I’ve been in love with interactive fiction since I was in elementary school. Text adventures were how I learned to program, and they’ve been bringing magic into my life ever since. I’m also a musician, and I release electronic music under the name Rythmos. My music is made with livecoding - a process that allows you to write and manipulate algorithms to create music on the fly. I’m currently working on my first full length inform 7 game, an accompaniment to an album that I will release alongside it. Even though I haven’t been that active, I am so grateful to this community for all the help they’ve provided during this project, and in general for keeping this beautiful artform alive. Thank you so much!

If you’re interested in any of my future music, IF project, or anything else, my website is rythmos.neocities.org

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Manipulating algorithms on the fly sounds interesting, for sure. So it’s something like live programming? Do you need a lot of programs to do that?

(Also, nice, another neocities user. XD)

Yeah that’s a great way to think of it! I use a platform called Tidalcycles, and it does have a lot of moving parts, but other platforms don’t! You can find out more at tidalcycles.org if you’re curious. Always nice to see a neocities user in the wild :grin:

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Hi! My name is Jaco or Jacoder23 online. I’m a student in their last year of their philosophy degree. I joined because I’ve been following IFComp for the past few years and while I’ve written a few IFs I’ve never thrown my hat in the ring. Most of what I’ve written tends to end up as fangames, you can see that over here at https://jacoder23.itch.io, but I’d like to take a shot at something original for once.

That said, I’m not expecting to place high but I think the motivating factor of a deadline and competition will be worthwhile in it of itself.

Let’s see. I spent a while talking but haven’t said anything about what IF I enjoy. Let me remedy that. I quite like the works of Chandler Groover and Brendan Patrick Hennessy but I think it’s John Ayliff’s games that I’ve cleared the catalogue of. I’m very fond of fantasy and sci-fi but I prefer character-driven stories over plot or worldbuilding heavy ones (though in either case, it all depends on if it’s been executed well).

Oh, and for my own entry into IFCOMP, I’m hoping to make an inverted detective story from the perspective of the living city the setting takes place in: the kind of game that has somewhat unique verbs for interacting with the world like Toby’s Nose’s smell and Ghost Simulator’s various ways of haunting people. Despite the fact I think a parser would probably be better suited to such a format, I’ll be using Twine since it’s what I’m most familiar with. Hopefully, it’ll turn out well! Or interesting, at least.

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Welcome (and nice Slay the Princess pfp!)

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Thank you!! I’m a big fan of Slay the Princess hehe, I have a fanfic taking time away from writing

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Writing a story/game from the POV of a city where the characters live sounds like a great idea. Reminds me of one of my favourite Campaign Trail mods, 2024: American Spirit, where you play as the American Spirit trying to hold the country together.

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God I love Horse Master. Welcome!

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Zork is in Call of Duty? So cool.

Welcome!

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Hullo, everybody, I’m Vyner. I’ve been playing intfiction for as long as I can remember, honestly, and I deeply enjoy reading in general. My literary tastes are actually part of why I’ve become interested in this medium in the first place–I think you could form a continuum from heavily reader-involved works like Pale Fire to IF, and retain the literary quality of the former. I’m more of a Twine reader than a parser fan, though I’ll admit that the latter has lead to some very interesting puzzles.

With regards to my favorite games, I actually don’t have too many–I’ll confess that there are many games which have been a bit of a miss for me. Still, I’d say that I’ve deeply enjoyed a good number of works: Anchorhead for its atmosphere, Vespers for the same, and everything about De Baron. I appreciate the irony of saying I prefer Twine as a format while only listing Inform games as examples of things I like, but I suppose that just demonstrates that you can make a good game with any system provided you put in the work.

I’ve recently gotten into trying to make a game of my own in Twine, revolving around an insurgency on Mars in an alternate timeline; I confess that it might have gotten a bit out of hand with regards to size and scope.

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I like everything in that sentence.

Welcome!

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Hello Everyone, I’m GreenGuitar673. I’m a university student from Canada. Right now, I’m getting ready to start work on a Masters degree with a thesis on game preservation. I came about IF in a very roundabout way. Technically my first experience was playing some sort of adventure game on the family computer as a kid (I’m sure it had graphics, but my mom insists it was Zork). My first experience that I remember and the one that got me into IF was looking up all the different Easter Eggs on Google with one of my friends in high school and finding the Text Adventure Easter Egg.

After having a lot of fun with that one, I decided to look up some other text-based games and found Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. After struggling with the very beginning of that game, I mentioned it to a friend who happened to be reading the book at the time, where I found out that the early game closely mirrors the book and I would need to read it to get past the first 30 moves. That whole experience led me to a love of comedic fiction, particularly from Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. After that experience, I was hooked on IF and have been playing every since. I’ve lurked on this site for a while and finally decided to create an account today. I’m looking forward to participating in some discussions!

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Welcome ! I’m the resident historian, and if you need, you can ask me (but many others has solid knowledge on earlier IF)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Hi, I’m Ivan.

The first IF I ever saw was one of Scott Adams’ adventures, maybe Adventureland or Pirate Adventure, on a computer owned by my first girlfriend. This would’ve been around 1980 when having a home computer was a rarity, and I don’t even remember what the heck she had. My mom got me my own first computer two or three years later, an Apple IIci. I don’t specifically remember discovering Infocom, or which Infocom game I played first, but I do remember spending the next few years haunting computer stores looking for new Infocom games.

Fast forward to the mid '90s when, inspired by Myst, I self-published a CD-ROM game, Calliope. In a move that seems kind of bizarre in hindsight, I pivoted from CD-ROM games back to interactive fiction, and wrote a game called Sunset Over Savannah (in TADS), which went into the '97 IFComp.

I hung out with the rec.arts.int-fiction / ifMUD crowd from the late 90’s into the early aughts, and helped organize some of the first cross-country ifMUD gatherings. A few years later I fell out of the IF crowd and into the Burning Man crowd, and then a few years after that trump happened, and I put my head down and focused on work (mostly Javascript and Unity, plus a hodgepodge of random technologies).

Right around the time COVID hit, I was feeling old and nostalgic for the toys of my youth and felt an itch to return to IF. I looked at the state of IF dev tools and while I have mad respect for TADS, Inform, Twine, none of them spoke to me. So I boldly started building my own parser in vanilla Javascript. How hard could it be??, I thought. And I’ve been working on that for about five years now. I would say it’s on par with TADS for scope, though I really hope it’s easier to use. It has no dependencies and runs natively in any modern web browser. It’s already usable to a large degree but still lacking some important features; has hundreds of pages of documentation but still needs a hundred more; and needs loads of debugging; so I expect it won’t be releasable for at least another year or two. But I see it as a future retirement project, and I expect to continue developing it for some time.

Ironically, I started building not long before ChatGPT was publicly released. I knew my project was niche and antiquated when I began it, and now it’s even more so. FWIW, while I warily use AI in my professional work, I disdain it for creative work and there’s no AI output in my parser. (I admit I did use AI to make some placeholder images that I still need to replace, during an exploratory GUI phase, because my parser can do Legend-style hybrid games). But if we’re going to outsource our creative expression to machines, then what even is the point of being human?

Anyhoo, I’ve been working in isolation, and I felt like I should probably catch up with the IF community to see what people are doing these days. I’ve been lurking on and off for a while and figured it was past time to introduce myself. So, hiya. I’m in the Seattle area and hope to make it to a Seattle meetup one of these days.

Thanks for reading.

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Welcome back ! Back then, I liked Sunset over Savannah, one of the major work done during the transition between commercial IF and the IF community eras…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Hello hello. Back in the day I was a big fan of Sea Stalker and Wishbringer, even though I banged my head against the wall for hours and never actually finished them :slight_smile:

I messed with adventure game creation with AGS back in the day to make a game for my art-buff wife with a bunch of famous painting backdrops. Did a lot of Ultima Unlimited.

Now I’m trying to patch together a little 2-room adventure as a bonus supplement for my ttrpg group, and if it works well maybe I’ll do more like it in the future.

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