So I have a game I’ve been working on for well over a year now and was thinking of entering IFCOMP as a way to bite the bullet and get myself to finish the editing process.
The problem is, I looked through last year’s entries and none of them really resemble mine? I know in some ways that’s a good thing, but my game is a choice based dating sim and there were maybe two entries last year that even mentioned romance? I’ve been jokingly referring to it as an ‘otome’ game since it’s pretty close to those, just text based instead of a visual novel.
I’m sure some people will say it’s worth submitting anyway, and I do want to hear from those folks, but also:
Are there competitions or events that are a better fit for work more like mine?
The best place, also because is less overcompetitive, is the Spring Thing; individual ribbons are a far better measurement of merits and actual demerits for uncommon stories, like your romance/otome story, than a top-down results table.
To be a little more cautious than Daniel – I don’t think we know how big a chunk of the IFComp audience would like it (because as you say, IFComp doesn’t get much of this), and you’ll definitely get people who will try it (and have opinions about it) just because it’s in the comp even though they don’t like the genre.
You’ll also get people who will engage with it thoughtfully even though they don’t know much about the genre, and presumably some people who do play a lot of romance games as well.
If you’re looking for a more focused audience then I wonder if something like the Otome Jam might be a better fit even if it’s not a VN? And maybe get you more attention overall? This community is TINY compared to the VN one(s), though I don’t know what engagement rates are like there. But if you’re just looking for a deadline and are OK with a more mixed audience and some people not getting it then yeah, IFComp is worth a shot
Edit: Actually, if you want a really colorful outsider take, you could check out Stan Baxter’s postmortem for Sextuple L – I think it’s a little disingenuous but it certainly puts that side of the case very strongly.
I found a jam that will (hopefully) be a better fit:
I think this is my best option since it explicitly asks for smut, which my game contains. It also has a deadline, and a later one at that, which I think will be very helpful.
I’ll consider IFComp again when I finish my more fantasy-adventure oriented game.
One of the best things about the IF community is there’s always some sort of competition going on, and all of them tend to get great engagement (reviews, feedback, etc). I’m glad you found one that works!
I wanted to add, one of the arts of comp/jam entering is carefully vetting the entry requirements of each thing. Sometimes you can increase the number of things you can enter by doing it in the right order.
To enter IFComp, you can’t have released your game publicly before. The rules of the Josei After Dark don’t say anything about that. It seems like it’d be worth asking about in advance, but then, if you really wanted to enter both, you’d just make sure to enter IFComp first. In your case, the timing looks pretty good - Josei is hot on the heels of IFComp. And the non-overlap of audiences would be to your advantage.
EDIT - Following my own advice, I stared harder at Josei, and I see it probably opens just days before IFComp ends. IFComp may not like that because an overlap would expose your game to a new larger pool of voters. Anything like that, just check with the organisers of each thing.
IFComp also tends to be very diverse; there’s always a bunch of games that is not like anything else! You will probably get some really thoughtful, serious reviews if you enter, by people who want to think through what works, what doesn’t, and why. If that’s the kind of feedback you’d like to get, it could be a reason to enter IFComp.
My own romance games (Turandot, Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates) have done quite well, but I’m sure they’re very very different from yours!
I’m not trying to start anything, but I’m curious, because I had a lot of thoughts about Baxter’s postmortem (I loved Sextuple L btw). Do you mind saying what about it you thought was disingenuous?
I’ll DM you – I’m largely sympathetic to Baxter’s position and I think it’s an entirely understandable one, just bits of it seem a little inconsistent to me. Not that any of us are ever fully consistent, heh.
Taking my very positive review of the game and somehow twisting my words to make me sound as someone who hated it, just so that the author could play the misunderstood genius.
I’m late to this thread and also curious–idk if you mind sharing in DMs?
Also @VictorGijsbers I’d like to hear about your experience also, only if you’re ok with sharing of course.
I’m not Josh or Victor, of course, but as someone who also really liked the game, I had a similar reaction to the postmortem, which made it seem like a transgressive attempt to épater la IF bourgeoisie – when in fact the large majority of the IF bourgeoisie didn’t find the subject matter remotely challenging but a bunch of folks who tended to come from more marginalized backgrounds found some aspects, especially the bits depicting fatphobia, poorly handled.
A bit of self-mythologizing is a venial sin, of course! But it can certainly be annoying.
I liked this game quite a bit, even though I thought there were a few weaknesses regarding pacing and presentation of the protagonist. I wrote a very positive review, which also addressed these (in my mind) weaknesses – as weaknesses of craft, mind you. I was not bothered in the slightest by the content. Nor do I recall anyone being bothered by it. Sextuple L got a really good reception. It won the banana not because it involved trans latex kink, but because it involved massive walls of text without choice points and was far, far too long for the competition.
And then we get this self-aggrandising post-mortem called ‘Anonymously Submitting Transgressive Transexual Trauma to IFComp Because the Rules Said I Could do That’. As if the author has done something very edgy that would upset the squares. Since no squares got upset, some imagination has to be involved – and I’m picked out and misrepresented as somebody who would never get the game, who wrote a ‘vitriolic’ review, and who dared to complain about the believability of the character even though it was all taken from real life. (As if taking something from real life somehow obviates the necessity of then turning those real life experiences into a well-crafted text that conveys them to the reader!) That annoyed me. Being misrepresented annoys me, but what annoys me more is that I’m being used as a prop for somebody’s own self-mythologising.
One of the online characters in the game is in fact constantly doing that: using other people in order to construct their own mythical picture of themselves. In that regard, the post-mortem might be said to continue the game by other means. One can hope it was on purpose. That would be next level.
Personally I thought the jab at “People who couldn’t stop talking about this game on Discord” was also pretty disingenuous. I was present for many of those conversations and they were other queer people talking about the fatphobia and otherwise dissecting a purposely complicated and provocative game, not “complaining that L didn’t put his phone on silent”.
