Iron ChIF: Premier Challenger Vote (Fri Sep 26 to Sun Sep 28)

[otistdog]

The winter is long, but in spring flowers blossom!

Welcome to the official thread for selection of the Premier Challenger for Iron ChiF. The various confirmed challengers, each marked by raw courage and fierce determination, will present below their pitches for your consideration.

Voting will be here on this thread starting at noon UTC Friday Sep 26 and will be open for 48 hours. Each voter may cast votes for up to five different challengers. Use all five of your votes – it is the most auspicious number! Although only one challenger can be the first, the total vote result will influence the scheduling of future episodes if the pilot is a success.

Challengers: It is now time to see who among you will prevail in securing the honor of being first to challenge an Iron Chef. Post your pitches below and set sail on the winds of fate!

Who should be the Premier Challenger for Iron ChIF? (alphabetical by handle, choose up to 5)

• BadParser
• caleb
• Ellric
• FLACRabbit
• johnnywz00
• jjmcc
• Lancelot
• lpsmith
• malacostraca
• nilsf
• Norbez
• Pacian
• rileypb
• Roger
• Vyner_Vanderhumeken
• Zed

[Vyner_Vanderhumeken]

Vyner Vanderhumeken is a rookie in the truest sense of the word. He has no accolades, no awaited releases, certainly no published games. His opponents scoff at him, greenhorn that he is, and even his friends look on with worry when he says he wants to compete. His experience with Interactive Fiction is mostly playing with it, not making it, and though he’s not exactly unfamiliar with how to write, he has yet to make use of it with a finished product.

But a man doesn’t sign up for an IF community because he’s content with what he’s got, and what Vyner has got are dreams–rife with splendorous vistas and daunting horrors, great battles and funny things you can do with Twine, and above all, his will, his undying will, to one day prove himself a half-decent-ish writer. Maybe even a fully decent one. Maybe even a good one!

‘Course, dreams don’t always come true.

Is he daring or just a fool? Will he beat the odds in a smashing debut, or will he sputter to the finish line with Idiot Baby’s First Published Product? Will he honor his imagination with harmony and elegance, or will he crash and burn like a Ford Pinto? Will he finally wrestle that damn Javascript under control? Well, there’s only one way to find out–and that’s a vote for VYNER VANDERHUMEKEN, America’s twelfth favorite underdog.

Vote Vyner: It’ll Be Entertaining No Matter What.

[rileypb (Phil Riley)]

Having burst onto the scene in 2022 with the original and stunning Towers of Hanoi, Phil has most recently released the original and stunning Gardening Simulator which has garnered an amazing 5-star rating on IFDB.

But Phil is most acclaimed for his original and stunning Bureau of Strange Happenings, the original and stunning story of a locked drawer and the travails of the hapless agent assigned to open it. It ran away with IFComp 2024, as long as you start counting at 18. Someone even stopped Phil once and said they liked BOSH, which made him feel like a celebrity.

Phil is eager to take on the Iron Chefs because each competition only lasts five days, which not only keeps the period of agony brief, but fits well within the limits of his typical ADHD hyperfocus interval. He pledges to do his very best to create an original and stunning work to rival that of the Iron Chef!

[FLACRabbit]

AGENT DOSSIER

Pseudonym: FLACRabbit

Real Name: Felix Lloyd Alastair Crabbit

Completed Assignments:
  Author of A Smörgåsbord of Pain (CODENAME: OPERATION ALL YOU CAN BEAT)
  Author of A Matter of Heist Urgency (CODENAME: OPERATION SMASH AND GRAB)
  Composer for Ataraxia (CODENAME: OPERATION INNER PEACE)
  Developer of IFDB Tag Manipulator (CODENAME: OPERATION CATEGORIZATION CATACLYSM)

In all seriousness, though: In addition to being an IF author, I am an electronic music composer, and I want to show that music can really enhance the playing experience. If I get selected, you might get to hear an original track or two, written specifically for my Iron ChIF submission!

I’m also a big fan of action scenes, and one of my goals is to bring a tabletop RPG-like feel to IF fights. The combat sequences in A Matter of Heist Urgency were praised by a number of reviewers, including Victor Gijsbers. Ordinarily, I go to great lengths to hide the mechanical skeleton under thousands of words of carefully written descriptions, but if you vote for me, you’ll see how my systems work under the hood.

(If you object that the ingredient restriction might not allow me to add an action scene, I’ll tell you something that screenwriters have known for a long time: there is always a way to add an action scene.)

But perhaps the most impressive thing about me is my extreme overconfidence. A rhetorical straw man once asked me, “Do you really think you can win, given that your first game placed 34th* in the Comp?”

“Yes,” I answered, without any hesitation, “…if Ryan Veeder is having a sufficiently bad week.”

* On an unrelated note, try pronouncing “34th” so it sounds like “3rd or 4th.” It’s surprisingly easy and rewarding!

[BadParser]

Sometime in late 2007, someone named Mike Tarbert began posting on rec.arts.int-fiction as “Skinny Mike.”

On April 26, 2008 a poster named Tracey asked for help implementing a particular scenario in Inform 7. Mike’s posted response, “Quiz Show” was, in the words of none other than Emily Short a mere hour and a half later, “entirely unrepresented in the manual.” She went on to ask for permission to include it in the official examples. With permissions from all parties, it was added to build 5T18 – released four days later on April 30th, albeit slightly edited; the newly-minted “official” version used the “Python-style” colon and indentation syntax for “if / while / repeat” phrases, which was also introduced in this build. (Mr. Tarbert has never claimed credit for the development or adoption of this syntax for the Inform language; this is most probably a coincidence.)

As of Inform 10.1.2, “Quiz Show” is example #323 from WI §17.17 Context: understanding when.

He went on to test numerous award-winning IF works (Nightfall, Berrost’s Challenge, Mrs. Pepper’s Nasty Secret, Pascal’s Wager, Escapade!) and was “especially” thanked in the credits for Violet.

Then, sometime in 2018, “Skinny Mike” vanished.

In August 2019 – having been forced for heretofore undisclosed reasons to adopt a secret identity – he re-joined intfiction.org, choosing the username BadParser.

BadParser won Bubbling Beaker Award® #6 and received a post facto honorable mention (as Skinny Mike) in Matt Weiner’s win for Bubbling Beaker Award® #10.

BadParser is also rumored to be the author of several unfinished and/or unreleased extensions. Whether or not the exposure of Iron ChIF will bring a spotlight on the work of this influential, mysterious, behind-the-scenes artisan remains to be seen.

[malacostraca (Sarah W.)]

I love writing games. I’ve been writing games since I was nine years old, though I didn’t start sharing my work until a few decades later. It’s my chosen art form—a way of sublimating feelings and messages into a world state that others can experience and hopefully enjoy.

I’m not a competitive person by nature. I believe each of us has something valuable to offer with our own unique creative approach, and to me competitions are not about being the best. If a game is valuable to one person, that’s a success.

All that said, I’m absolutely determined to destroy Iron Chef Inform 7 in this challenge.

[lpsmith (Lucian Smith)]

Emerging from retirement for this five-day Interactive Fiction Sprint: Iron Challenger Lucian Smith! Is he nostalgic for his glory days of 1997, when his freshman work, “The Edifice” won the third annual IF Comp, whereupon he promptly failed to produce any work of substance ever again? Or does he yearn once again to revel in the shorter works that characterized his later IF career, with a single work of Speed IF, followed by several IF Whispers games, culminating in what is perhaps the greatest IF Whispers work in existence: Cragne Manor? Perhaps the accolades gained from those collaborative works have blinded him to the reality of this Iron ChIF competition: he will have to work solo once again! Against the formidable Iron ChIF Ryan Veeder, no less!

One unsubstantiated rumor has it that it is his own son, a recent Creative Writing graduate with a yen for computer games, that has re-vitalized his own soul with a desire to rekindle the flames of Interactive Fiction in his own life, that he may pass it on, re-lit, to this next generation. But if true, he may not even realize that IF has moved on, and the audience that will judge his work are no longer the nostalgic denizens of r*if, but newly-emerged connoisseurs of new breeds of fiction, with new desires and sensibilities! Would he mire his son in the past, in a desperate and ultimately futile bid to be ‘relevant’ once more?

Wait, he emerges! Let’s see if we can get a quote! Mr. Smith, Mr. Smith! Why are you entering this competition?

“Uh, it sounded fun? And did you hear my son signed up too? Woo!”

Was there a hint of sadness behind those eyes?^[1] Time alone will tell. Back to you, Odog.

---

1. No ↩︎

[Ellric]

Greetings, everyone. Welcome to the pre-interview with the next contestant to throw their hat into the ring. Please give a warm welcome to… Ellric Smith!”

Uproarious applause from parents, and some polite, yet confused clapping from some of the audience

Now, Ellric. I’ve heard that your sole experience with Twine is a single partially completed Mass Effect fan fiction.

… First off, I didn’t hear a question, but yes, that’s a thing I am working on.

I see, I see. It’s said the lifeblood of this show is the updates from contestants. Do you believe that people can be entertained seeing you staring at a screen, struggling to write a few lines only to delete them again?

Well, I’m already regretting the format of this interview, so ‘probably not’. But I am usually pretty funny. My jokes have an over 90% success rate.

And how much of that is your own insecurities waiting to make absolutely sure you joke will land before you speak, and how much is others simply being polite?

I-

No no, don’t answer that. Don’t want to waste this word count any more than you already have.

You-

Moving on. What have you written before, if there’s anything of note?

I wrote an award-winning short play, and I’ve written a full novel. In college I outproduced all my colleagues, getting up to the page maximum for every in class submission, and being the only one to have something to submit to the out of class writers room each week without fail.

Well, quantity has a quality all its own, after all. Last question. Do you think making a fake interview with a hostile interviewer is enough to ingratiate you to the audience?

I-

Well, that’s about our word count, see you next time, everyone.

You mother-!

[Pacian]

From a grey and atavistic island somewhere in the Atlantic, it’s C.E.J. Pacian: assembled in the Twentieth Century by unknown powers using patchwork constituents, this strange being persists into the modern era, occasionally spewing out parser and even hypertext games.

Do you want to see a weird creature or star-crossed romance served as the main course? Garnished with jetbikes, guns or grappling hooks? And you don’t care that he doesn’t 100% understand how Dialog works and hasn’t actually used many of its most notable features? Then track down this mythical cryptid and drag him wailing and hissing into the Kitchen Stadium Intfiction Forum to start cooking!

[caleb (Caleb Wilson)]

Why should you pick me, Caleb Wilson, as an Iron Chef IF challenger?

• I am good at making small games with constraints. Of my 31 credited entries on ifdb.com, 26 were made for time-limited competitions. My likely best and certainly most-celebrated piece, Lime Ergot, was originally written in 3 hours.

• Yet I am still under the radar! I want to take part in this challenge as a way of introducing more people to my work. I feel as though I’ve made a number of novel and unique works that are worthy of discussion but which remain unknown to many people. In particular, I think that The Northnorth Passage, The Bootscraper, Sohoek Ekalmoe, and The Unstoppable Vengeance of Dr. Bonesaw all play with the accepted conventions of parser IF in interesting ways. Sometimes my mind comes up with new ways to do things under under pressure, and hopefully this challenge will be one of those times.

• I am actually not particularly good at coding! But I think I can make good interactive fiction anyway. I hope that with this challenge I can demonstrate that being a coding wizard isn’t necessary.

• I have a “Music app” full of excellent coding tunes on my computer. So, I can promise I will be enjoying a fine soundtrack while I prepare my challenge! I will include listening notes in my daily code entries, and my taste in music is at least as good, if not better, than my taste in interactive fiction.

Thank you for your consideration!

Caleb

[nilsf (Nils Fagerburg)]

If memory serves me right, Nils first bumbled onto the IF scene during the 2019 edition of ECTOcomp (which he lost). Later that year he entered the – now defunct – subQjam and was soundly trounced. In early 2020 he participated in the second quadrennial Ryan Veeder exposition for good interactive fiction and was defeated once more. Later that same year he entered ECTOcomp again and, again, failed to win. In 2021 he fooli ^W bravely submitted a piece to the venerable IFComp and was of course beaten. For that year’s ECTOcomp he attempted a petite mort game instead of his usual grand guignol offering but was no more successful. In 2022 he entered both the TALP contest and ECTOcomp but had little to show for either.

Now he is set to challenge an Iron Chef. Will his luck turn? Probably not, but he’ll surely have fun and hopes the players will too.

[jjmcc]

There’s an old (insulting) saying, “If you can’t do, teach. If you can’t teach, critique.” As Iron ChIF Challenger, I would serve notice of a new aphorism for the new Millennium: “If you can critique, you are IMMEDIATELY OVER-QUALIFIED TO BOTH DO AND TEACH.” Relatively new to the IF world, since his arrival in 2022 JJMcC has demonstrated that there is no confidence like UNEARNED confidence. His spicy takes on unsuspecting amateur works have been voluminous, spirited, and only occasionally actively deplorable.

It is that confrontive, painfully oblivious energy JJMcC will bring to Iron ChIF as a challenger. So whether you follow his work with the dread fascination of a three-year slow-motion trainwreck, or are excited to see some well-earned comeuppance, I can promise you whatever the outcome, it will not be QUIET.

JJMcC is not here to make friends. It is far too late in life for THAT. He is here to claim the Iron ChIF TADS throne and chew bubble gum. You can guess what his bubble gum supply is.

(By the way. Teachers, you do NOT deserve the current aphorism. Critics, on the other hand, yeah, that’s perfectly fair.)

[Lancelot (Onno Brouwer)]

MC: “Will the next ZIL Challenger please step forward”

Lancelot smoothly glides forward, twirling his IF Challenger cape as he passes between the rows of torches towards the main stage.

MC: “Why should we choose YOU, Lancelot, as the Iron Chef ZIL Challenger?”

Lancelot steps off his vacuum cleaner and almost trips over his IF Challenger cape, ripping it in the process. “Erm, hold on a sec…” Lancelot consults his notes and clears his throat.

“I learned Inform7 and created One King to Loot them All for IFComp 2023. I learned Twine and created One King to Loot them All for Spring Thing 2024 and Moon Logic for IFComp 2025. I learned Dendry and created Poetic Justice for SeedComp 2024 and Losing Track for Neo-Twiny Jam 2024 and my version for the Mini-Cluedo 2025 challenge.”

“I love to create IF! In any modern IF language!”

MC: “ZIL is not exactly known as a modern IF language.”

“That should be no problem! I love a good challenge!”

MC: “You better read up on the specs. Here’s my copy of Learning ZIL by Steve Meretzky.”

“Oh my god what have I gotten myself into… Still, now that I am here, I will give it my best, bring it on! FIGHTING!”

[Zed (Zed Lopez)]

I maintain the Inform 7 Docs and Resources post, I created the web remix of the I7 docs, and I’m a contributor to the I7 project itself. So that’s why you should pick me, Zed Lopez, as the Iron ChIf Challenger in… [checks notes] Twine!

«record scratch»

I’ve never done anything in Twine, so my inevitable crashing and burning will make for hilarious television forum posts!

[Norbez (Norbez Jones, call me Bez (e/em/eir))]

I’ve been making IF for a decade, and now, I am finally ready for the ultimate challenge of my career: facing an Iron Chef head-on!

I know how to make a quality game in a short amount of time. On my itch.io page, the majority of my 89 projects were created is for game jams. And quite a few of my games for IF Comp have been Speed IF, most noticeably Bi Lines, which was put together in 3 days. 10 years of doing this has sharpened my abilities & made me able to manage scope. So, making something awesome in the time period for Iron Chef IF is going to be a piece of cake!

I also have a unique ethos that comes to game development & creation in general: my projects are mainly about mental health, queerness, recovery, and the like. About the struggles we have as humans, and what we can do to overcome them. I make these games in the hopes that those who are the same way feel seen, and those who are unaware of such things understand what they’re like. This makes me unique upon the competitors, and ensures I’m going to make a type game nobody will be able to see coming.

Finally, I’ve been the proud recipient of IF Comp’s Golden Banana Of Discord. If that doesn’t make you vote for me, I don’t know what will.

[otistdog]

The challenger selection poll has been added (a little late) to the top post, so cast your votes! Voting will close in 48 hours.

[severedhand]

We’re down past the 36 hour mark so keep voting!

-Wade

[rileypb (Phil Riley)]

Less than 16 hours to go! More votes!

[otistdog]

We have a winner! Congratulations to @Pacian, who will be challenging Iron Chef Dialog (@Draconis).

I’ll follow up with everyone about scheduling and will post the dates for the pilot episode as soon as they’re hashed out.

Allez cuisine!

[Pacian]