Now that IFComp is finally over, people have seen ratings and are beginning to post postmortems. For those of you who did judging, or even those of you who made a game and couldn’t find anywhere to post this kind of thing in your postmortem:
What did you learn from this year’s assortment of games (or comments on your own ones), that would influence how you make games in the future? Any overall thoughts?
Also, how many of you are thinking of entering IFComp next year?
Overall, I have diverse thought, but needs sorting & organising, so later,
on my entry, well, I have already opened the debate on Primo contatto in the Italian forum, releasing a public pre-alpha test version (the cover and the last three passages) in just a pair of hour after the end of this 'comp, and this alone speaks volumes…
on the lessons learned from assortment of games, I appreciate your initiative: having this centralised debate will avoid dispersion of overall lessons learned around all the many post-mortems.
I’ve restarted work on a game that possibly could be in IFComp next year. But it’s a big project that I started working on years ago, so don’t hold your breath.
I’m planning to be back again next year, as I said in my postmortem overnight. This is all contingent on my illness playing nicely enough (progressive neurological illness - extremely disabling, and worsening more and more). But having managed rather to my surprise to finish another game this time, I’m intending to be back for more!
The biggest takeaway I have from this year’s competition, and my entry specifically, is “THINK BIGGER!” My game was deliberately short. But I need to be much more ambitious. Towards that goal I’m starting writing earlier this time around
Other things that I took away from other games include:
blurb really matters!
definitely allow lots of time for playtesting
estimate playtime better
maybe engage more with the community during development - without giving away things I shouldn’t reveal about my entry - to help spur me on to finish
I’d like to include in-game hints this next time, having found those extremely helpful in other parser games
cover art matters! (yes you don’t need it but …) And I’m still determined to avoid AI made content
the standard this year was really high! so if I don’t rank very highly it’s ok. I’m among some great games.
I went into this comp thinking “Oh, wow, I’m not sure I want to do an RPG Maker entry ever again,” but the judges’ response has made me completely reconsider. I’m still not sure I’ll use RPG Maker again for 2025 (or 2026), but I am interested in further pushing the boundaries of what’s expected for an interactive fiction game. I’m tempted to try out something else with greater use of graphics - and possibly a physics engine.
The main thing I want to do for next year in particular, though, is finish Who Whacked Jimmy Piñata?, which would have been one of this year’s entries if I’d got any further than the starting room. I didn’t really have any interest in parser-based IF when I first got involved with IFComp, but seeing what other people have done with it makes me want to get more proficient. I’ve done one game that was ambitious but underimplemented, and another that was more polished but smaller in scope, so this time I want to try for something bigger that builds upon what I’ve learned so far. If anybody would like to help out, I’m hoping to get people on board to test it considerably earlier than usual this time!
Finally, though I feel as though I think this every year, I’d like to do more judging/reviewing next time around. I’m afraid I didn’t even manage to rate five entries for this one: the earlier start dragged it into a very busy time of year for me, and I was already completely exhausted from getting my own work in. I think I might have to just settle for trying to do less - maybe focus on the shorter games, and try to fit them in on my phone when I’ve got a spare few minutes while out and about.
I’ve made a very specific resolution just now: a list of go/no go deadlines for my next game. If I make all the deadlines, I enter it in IFComp. If I miss a deadline, then who knows when it will come out.
November 15: refamiliarised myself with the code and fixed some obvious things
January 15: finished the second redacted spoiler
March 15: finished the third redacted spoiler
April 1: be ready for alpha testing of the core areas
June 15: be ready for beta testing of a more or less complete game
And there’s one obvious final deadline, but Jacqueline will set it for me.
New year’s resolution: figure out what’s next, honestly. We’ve been working on Winter-Over directly or indirectly since 2020 and it’s very weird to not have a big project in the pipeline. Yes, we’re going to start Lady Thalia 4 soon, but while that’s certainly not going to be the last LT game it’s going to wrap up the current main storyline and we haven’t thought much about what’s next beyond it. So there’s a big, amorphous hole in our IF plans starting April, which is new and strange!
There’s a game I’ve been working on for years that’s kind of hard to finish that I’d like to enter into IFcomp next year. I haven’t entered since around 2020 because I’ve been on the committee, but there were several new people this year so I should be able to take a year off to enter again. It’s not an “IFcomp winning” game idea so would just be something fun to place lower down.
On the other hand, I really enjoy helping with IFcomp so I might just enter parsercomp instead, which is a competition I also enjoy. If something weird happens and I get booted off the IFcomp committee then I guess I’d enter into IFcomp after all