Sound great - will be happy to playtest and judge. (Also, 8.1.2: I think you mean egregious).
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As long as it’s a “finished game”. So short games are fine, demo’s are fine providing they offer a good and self-contained game.
Let me give an example.
“The House Abandon” was essentially a full demo which was released and could be played and completed in isolation and made total sense. There was no “watch this space for the next release or full version”.
Later the full game, “Stories Untold”, was released and “The House Abandon” became Act I of the larger game.
Hope that helps!
Adam
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Good spot! I swear my typing and spelling gets worse every year. I’ll edit that for the final release. 
Also thanks for looking to take part and support the competition, much appreciated!
Adam
Good point - all allowed - I will edit accordingly for the final release of the rules. Thanks!
Adam
Hi Adam,
Thank you for clarification on those points.
Will check final rules in due course.
catventure.
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Thanks for organizing this!
I’m not sure whether I’ll have time to participate, but it sounds good.
A question concerning point 4 and 5, the submissions and voting periods:
“you are free to upload your game and enter it into the competition at any point during the Registration/Submission window”
Will the entries be public as soon as they are uploaded?
I just ask because that seems to be the way most game jams on itch.io handle it, and it’s the default setting there, as far as I know.
If so, that could theoretically mean that a game which was uploaded quite early in the submission period could garner a lot more views/support than others before the judging period, couldn’t it?
That seems like it would be in tension with the emphasis placed by rule 8 on non-promotional testing and not being released.
So, I guess the jam will probably use itch’s feature to hide submissions before the end of the submission period?
https://itch.io/docs/creators/game-jams#jam-customization/hide-submissions-before-end
("Normally, during a jam’s submission period, entries are displayed on the jam page immediately after submission. This may give an unfair distribution of attention to submissions that come earlier than others.
The Hide submissions before end hides the submissions list from the jam’s page until the submission period is over. This ensures that every entry will have the same visibility.")
Although note that that page also says: “Jam submissions are still accessible by their direct URL, or via the project’s page on itch.io.”
So, just to be clear, even if the submissions are hidden on the jam page, if someone uploads a game early on, the individual project page and the game will be publicly available. (Or can one submit a private itch page to a jam? Probably not?)
I guess it’s reasonably safe to assume that this specific sort of public availability will simply drown in the sea of all new releases on itch? If so, then no undue attention will be generated, and the effect would be no more promotional than the open beta testing which is allowed by ParserComp. (Well, the author’s followers on itch will be notified, but presumably they might also have been notified for open beta testing anyway?)
So, umm, I don’t necessarily want to rehash the discussion from the other threads about the release definition etc., but I thought it’s better to talk about the issue beforehand. 
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These rules all make sense to me. Also, I think adopting Itch.io as a platform is a sensible choice.
Just to point out though that since Itch has a Game Jam model, there might be some extra work to do to emphasise that ParserComp is not a Jam. So how to publicise the comp prior to the the Jam period for example.
Itch is good for generating a buzz during the Jam period. This buzz will be about the playing and judging, and less so the game development, I suspect.
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In 1.1, ‘requirment’ should be ‘requirement’.
In 1.3, ‘Sound effects’ should probably be ‘Music and/or sound effects’.
1.4 would be better worded as 'Voice input and output are permitted to aid visually-impaired players, but this must be in addition to the text input and output.
In 2, ‘parser IF software systems’ may be clearer as ‘parser-based authoring tools’.
In 3, ‘ran’ should be ‘run’, ‘Itch.io’ should be ‘itch.io’ (lower case) and ‘Game Jam’ should be ‘game jam’ (lower case). Append ‘Therefore, participants and judges will need an itch.io account.’ and delete 3.1 and 3.2.
In 4, I think registration and submission should be separate, otherwise, you won’t have any idea how many people are interested until they have made their submissions at the end of the submission period. Separate registration and submission is the norm for itch.io. In any case, ‘Registration’ and ‘Submission’ should both be lower case.
In 4.1, ‘between the 1st to 31st July 2021’ should be ‘from 1 to 31 July 2021’.
In 5, ‘Itch.io’ should be ‘itch.io’ (lower case).
In 5.1, ‘between the 1st to 31st August 2021’ should be ‘from 1 to 31 August 2021’.
In 8.1, ‘Open Beta Testing’ should be '‘Open beta testing’.
In 8.1.2, ‘agregious’ should be ‘egregious’. (No idea what it meant. I had to look it up.)
In 8.1.4 & 5, both are missing the full stop at the end of the sentence.
In 8.1.5, ‘Link to the Open Test Repository i.e GitHub’ should be ‘How to acquire the game.’, as it could be on GitHub, GitLab, itch.io or any of a number of other repositories, or sent by personal message or email.
In 8.2, ‘lengh’ should be ‘length’.
In 8.3, ‘titles’ should be ‘title’, ‘are’ should be ‘is’ and add commas after ‘IntroComp’ and ‘complete’.
In 8.4, this would be better worded as ‘A translation of a previoulsy released work into another written language is considered a new work and is therefore eligible for entry.’
I think you should mention what languages are permitted. Must they be in English, or can they be in any language.
I think there should be a rule specifying that the content must not be offensive, racist, discriminatory, aggressive or what have you. I’m sure there’s a standard list of these things somewhere.
Assuming adult content is permitted, I think it should also say something about providing a warning about bad language, sexual content, extreme violence, horror or anything else that you don’t want little kiddies to be subjected to.
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Good point. As it’s a competition, it might be better if the submissions are hidden until the end of the submission period, like for IFComp et al.
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How can a a requirement be optional?
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Thanks for taking the time to review and feedback 
As written elsewhere I swear as I get older my spelling gets worse!! I did A Level English if you can believe that! 
Re’ the point about submission and registration, I thought about a separate deadline and put a week or month between them but then wondered what that would actually do? I would know ahead of submissions deadline whether we had 5 games or 50, but then what happens next is exactly the same I imagine. Again if I’m missing something then yeah let me know and I’ll rethink it.
Cheers
Adam
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There can’t, good spot, thanks! One for when I write the final version
Adam
Pretty excited about the comp, but I do disagree with this.
Parser based interaction has come a long way. Having some clicking (i.e. for conversation links) is pretty standard in a lot of modern parser games. What this is saying isn’t ‘ParserComp’ which should allow at least some innovation in how parser developed games interact with the audience, but instead it’s ‘Super Retro-ParserComp’ which I think would be a mistake if we want to encourage a wider audience.
Ade
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It’s a very good conversation to have. I wasn’t sure how best to write this rule and perhaps that’s why it reads as it does.
My thoughts. We have IFComp which has a very wide remit these days, so to my mind ParserComp really does need to keep it tight in terms of what it is & does. That might actually mean less experimentation which I agree would be a shame but then perhaps those boundary pushing works would be better suited to IFComp? Again, that’s just where my head is at the moment.
That said, clicking on key words and have them do something is entirely ok and I did some research to see how common this is as a function (from which I’m happy to allow this) but it needs to be there in addition to the keyboard text entry and onscreen text output, rather than it being possible to traverse the whole game by clicking on words.
But absolutely yes on top of the base of “using keyboard to enter what you want to do, and the computer gives you a text description in return” I’m happy for people to get creative - what this would be I have no idea, but that’s the beauty of boundary pushing. If the answer is “they can’t because the rule isn’t really allowing it” then I’d refer back to the earlier point that IFComp may be the better option.
Thanks for the support and the feedback!
Adam
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To me, this is important for parser based IF.
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Me too, and again I think that’s why we need to be careful and keep things fairly tight for ParserComp. I totally understand that “parsing” in 2021 could mean interpretating a series of mouse clicks but that’s not really what I’m looking to do here. As I said right at the start, think Zork with pictures and sounds and you’re there; clicking on key words on top of that is fine but a game where I can play all the way through with a mouse is more IFComp than ParserComp at time of writing.
Adam
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Hmm, something clicked for me when tundish pointed out this isn’t a game jam. I guess the competitions I’ve entered and enjoyed could all be considered game jams, with their shorter development periods and various constraints? In any case it sounds like this might not be a good thing to enter for someone like me who just has a month or so to devote to a game and doesn’t really want to compete with games that could have six months or more of dev time. I still look forward to playing the games though!
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No problem, there’s plenty of great Jams around now too so maybe they would be a better fit. No problem at all!
If people can find the time to play and cast their votes that would be great.
Adam
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As this is a parser comp, the submitted games should definitely be controlled by typing commands. However, when it comes to conversation with NPCs, it is very common that when you talk to a character, you get a numbered menu. You can then type “1” or "2 or…etc…
Typing a number isn’t really parsing either, but I guess that should be allowed. But if the conversation interface hasn’t been developed for typing numbers during conversation yet, only mouse clicks, then we may be disqualifying games, which fundamentally are parser games though the conversations require mouse clicks at the moment instead of hitting a number on the keyboard.
Whatever you decide, I respect it, since you can’t make everyone happy. But I just wanted to mention this in case you haven’t thought about it. One of the best parser games out there, Worldsmith by McTavish, is truly a parser game even though you during conversations must click on the text you want to say. Such an interface could be further developed to allow the user to type the number of the sentence they want to say. But typing menu numbers and hitting return hasn’t much to do with a parser either.
This reminds me, that there are CYOAs out there, made with parser engines, where you simply type numbers or letters given in menus. I don’t think these qualify as parser games either. I think(?) your “rule 1” excludes those, but I am not completely sure if menus within games are allowed, as long as they are not the primary mechanism of control?
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A few weeks ago I played Gateway 2. It’s a hybrid graphic/text adventure. Using the mouse is very handy in navigating conversations, manipulating locks and keypads, etc… You can also point and click on the graphics to EXAMINE and TAKE. However, it is possible to play the entire game without touching the mouse. It’s a convenient option but not necessary for completing the game. I think this should be the case for any entry in ParserComp.
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