Hello, fellow members of the IF community!
I still cannot believe that the IF comp is over and that the results were announced just two days ago. It feels like yesterday when I started writing Ghosts Within last year, at the same time that I started researching for my diploma thesis on Interactive Fiction. Literally!
I am really grateful that after so many hard-working hours, my efforts have been acknowledged, and I managed to achieve, in my opinion, a satisfying position in the competition. Considering I was a first-time author and I had no previous experience with IF in general, my initial goal for the comp was to reach the top 50% of the games, yet in the end, I managed to enter the top 40% (28th place)!
Therefore, I would like to thank from the bottom of my heart all the authors, judges, reviewers, beta-testers, and others who dedicated even a fraction of their time to take a look at Ghosts Within! And I cannot even thank enough those who ‘stuck’ with my game for many more hours than they were obligated to do.
That said, I should add that all the positive and negative reviews that I received helped me correct many minor bugs and linguistic errors, especially during the competition, while in addition, they will constitute a cornerstone in my further involvement with this type of text adventure games and with writing in general.
To add to that, as I mentioned in a previous post on the forum, I plan to make a small extension to this game, which, hopefully, will be uploaded on Ifdb next month. Though, before I do so, I’d really appreciate any beta-tester who would like to play the extended final product and give me his thoughts before I upload it! Just pm me if you are interested in such a scenario.
Last but not least, I would also like to congratulate the winning games of all the categories and apologize to the authors whose games I did not manage to judge. I hope, in the future, I will be able to evaluate more games in time and, who knows, maybe I’ll create another game!
— Kyriakos Athanasopoulos
P.S.: I would love to hear any thoughts or theories you might have about aspects of the game and story, though I probably won’t confirm anything too major to keep the mystery! 