List of Interactive Fiction Resources

I maintain a list of interactive fiction resources for the IF facebook page. It’s a bit a big list but even still it’s meant to be more useful than exhaustive. As I just updated the list I thought I’d repost it here. Let me know if there are any obvious omissions!
WHERE TO FIND IF:
http://ifdb.tads.org/ : huge database of works, with links to download or play online for most entries. Also has a rating system and lots of recommended lists.
http://textadventures.co.uk/ : Play text adventures in your browser, with discussion forums and free hosting for any html-playable IF game.
SOCIAL PLATFORMS
https://twitter.com/dswxyz/lists/intfiction
https://twitter.com/TheRealDominia/lists/if : There are quite a number of IF developers and players on twitter.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interactivefiction/ : Interactive fiction Reddit group.
https://www.ifmud.port4000.com : The MUD, more a IRC-style chat space than an actual MUD.
intfiction on FreeNode : IRC channel about IF.
www.discord.gg/reJbMUB : Interactive Fiction discord channel.
Interactive Fiction : Interactive Fiction Facebook group
FORUMS
http://www.intfiction.org/forum : General interactive fiction forum. Great for Inform coding help. Also the place to find upcoming game jams and competitions.
http://forum.adrift.co/ : Forum for the Adrift text adventure platform.
https://forum.choiceofgames.com/ : Forum for Choice of Games.
Recent Discussions - Twine Forum : Good place for Twine technical assistance.
HOSTING & MORE PLACES TO FIND IF
http://ifarchive.org/ : Interactive fiction archive. This is where you should send your game so future generations can enjoy it.
http://philome.la/ : Free hosting for Twine games (now Read Only)
Interactive stories, text-based games and visual novels. iFiction.net : Hosting for (Russian) AXMA games.
http://playfic.com/ : You can write Inform7 games in your browser and host them here and play other people’s games.
https://dashingdon.com/ : Database and free hosting for games made in choicescript.
https://itch.io/ : General indie game hosting and finding. You can monetise your games through it as well.
http://www.delron.org.uk/adrift-games.htm : Comprehensive list of Adrift games.
http://www.intudia.com - Interactive stories.
https://autorol.es - Spanish Choice games
REVIEWS, DISCUSSION, THEORY
http://planet-if.com/ : Planet-IF is a blog-roll of interactive fiction blogs. If you have a related blog you can have it added it to the list.
http://ifwiki.org/ : The IFWiki has links to reviews of competition games, theory articles and author information.
http://www.ifreviews.org/ : Extensive review site for interactive fiction.
http://xyzzyawards.org/ : The XYZZY Awards champion the best of each year’s IF. There’s some good in-depth analyses of games here.
http://www.brasslantern.org/ : Has some great classic articles on IF, not recently updated.
https://ifwizz.de/ : German IF-Database with many reviews (including reviews of English-language games).
http://trottingkrips.caltrops.com/ - Regular longform reviews
ENGINES FOR MAKING IF
https://docs.google.com/…/1-B1yKIateTpwTdRNT9W…/edit… - This is a grand list of engines, including several which are now defunct.
Here’s some of the most popular:
–PARSER–
http://inform7.com/ - Inform 7, natural language programming primarily for parser-based IF. Great documentation. Can export to a webpage. Built on Inform 6, it’s the most popular parser language.
http://tads.org/ - TADS, more programmer-orientated text adventure language. TADS games can be played online.
http://www.adrift.co/ - ADRIFT is a parser-game engine in which games can be created entirely with a GUI, without programming.
http://www.generalcoffee.com/hugo/gethugo.html - Hugo is a less commonly used engine which has great support for including multimedia. E.g. music, windows for NPC portraits, room depictions.
http://textadventures.co.uk/create - Quest is an engine for creating browser-playable IF, without requiring any programming skills.
https://adventuron.io/ - Adventuron is a parser game creator with support for having a location image screen.
–CHOICE–
http://twinery.org/ - Twine, passage-based choice fiction engine using simple but powerful markup language. Probably the most popular engine for hypertext-fiction.
GitHub - idmillington/undum: A client-side framework for narrative hypertext interactive fiction.
http://raconteur.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ - Undum, and the wrapper layer, Raconteur, is a way of making beautiful-looking sophisticated hypertext fiction. Bit more of a learning curve than with Twine.
https://www.choiceofgames.com/make…/choicescript-intro/ - Choicescript, easy to learn scripting language for making Choice of Games-style games. Possible commercial route for IF authors. There is an IDE available: About – The ChoiceScript IDE
https://texturewriter.com/ - Texture, the novel thing about Texture works is that there’s text and then you drag keywords onto the text, which reveals what can be interacted with. This allows the player to read before having hyperlinks drag their eye.
http://textadventures.co.uk/create - Squiffy, using the same underlying engine as Quest, is a way of making choice-based works using markup text.
http://www.inklestudios.com/ink/ - Ink, markup language behind Inklestudios commercial games Sorcery, Around the World in 80 Days. Open source, and integrated with Unity, good for using as the choice-component of a graphical game.
https://chooseyourstory.com/ - CYOA-style storygames with forum community.
PODCASTS
CLASH of the TYPE-INS - Clash of the Type Ins
adamcadre.ac: audio - Radio K
Eaten By A Grue, the Infocom Podcast. Infocom games, text adventures, and interactive fiction -- The Infocom Podcast -- Monster Feet Podcasts - Eaten by A Grue
inklecast | Free Listening on SoundCloud - Inklecast
https://letsplaypodcast.com/ - The Let’s Play Podcast
podcast - NarraScope - Narrascope
COMPETITIONS & INSTITUTIONS
https://ifcomp.org/ - The Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. There are prizes! Deadline every September.
https://www.springthing.net/ - The Spring Thing - Annual unranked competition encouraging longer interactive works.
http://introcomp.org/ - IntroComp - Annual competition for game openings. Cash prizes on game completion.
https://iftechfoundation.org/ - The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation maintains various projects above like the archive, and helps run the IFCOMP.
CONVENTIONS/CONFERENCES
https://narrascope.org - Annual narrative games conference
http://adventurexpo.org/ - Annual adventure/narrative games convention

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You can add my engine under the choice section if you want. Although it doesn’t have any users, so I understand if you want to only keep it to the popular ones and not include it.

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I was going to say that it can on the linked larger list of engines, but I’ve just realised that spreadsheet link is dead. I will have to see if there’s a live copy / start building my own big list!

Sadako looks very elegant and I’m sure it deserves some more exploration.

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I linked to this message in the Giant Resource List topic, thanks for these!

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Great!

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A few of us have been writing reviews here for the last couple of years. It seems that we are at a pace where it will continue indefinitely: http://trottingkrips.caltrops.com/

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I wonder if it would be great to list platforms like discord or slack where the community normally hangs out and chats. :slight_smile:

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No list would be complete without Jason Dyer’s excellent ‘All the Adventures’ project site… All the Adventures | Renga in Blue

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Also, for text adventures and parser-based interactive fiction…
http://solutionarchive.com/

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On Engine List - IFWiki there’s also a comprehensie list of engines.

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That place has saved my sanity more times than I care to remember.

I’ve mentioned one of the discord channels I was aware of. If there are others you think I should have put up let me know.