Hello! I’m looking around at what we have available before starting up the 2023 IFDB awards.
I was playing a ‘Short Game Showcase’ game today from 2023 that didn’t have the publication date on IFDB. So I wanted to put out a reminder that, if you have a game from 2023 that you want to make sure people consider for the IFDB awards, make sure the publication date is correctly labelled on IFDB. Having the wrong date won’t disqualify the game, but it will make it not show up in the ‘suggested voting’ list.
The current systems that I’m seeing that have at least 5 games published in 2023 are:
Twine (277)
Inform 7 (69)
Ink (65)
Choicescript (32)
Inform 6 (16)
Punyinform (25) (Note: Punyinform is a variant of Inform 6, but last year we included it as a separate category. The reason there are more Punyinform games than Inform 6 is that some people have listed the development language as PunyInform, rather than in the tags. That’s totally fine, and things don’t have to be tagged correctly to get votes, but I’m interested in thoughts on how to make a nice IFDB search for these two categories).
Custom (20)
Moiki (18) (this is a french system)
Ren’py (14)
Adventuron (13) (one of which is the same game in two languages)
Storynexus (12) (these are all Fallen London exceptional stories. Would it make sense to include them as their own category? They all cost money. I don’t expect many people to vote here, but if enough people express interest, we could do this).
Unity (9)
bitsy (7) (although one is the same game, just in two languages)
texture (7)
Gruescript (5)
TADS (5) (thanks GET CORN)
ADRIFT (5)
Systems that don’t make the cut
Decker (5) (but 2 are the same game in different languages, so I don’t think it counts)
Narrat (4)
Dendry (3)
Quest (2)
Donjon (2)
Tapewindow (2)
AGT (2)
ZIL (2)
Videotome (2)
Python (2)
So as things currently stand, I’ll likely create games in the categories as shown above.
The list of games that don’t fit the above criteria can either be found here:
or here. (I remember that IFDB messes up either plain links or hyperlinked links, but not the other, so one of these should work).
Edit: If you don’t think a system really deserves its own category, you can simply not vote in it. Categories without enough votes, as per the rules, don’t have anything awarded.
Editedit: Languages are currently:
French: 67
Spanish: 20
German: 5
There are 10 chinese games, none of which have ratings on IFDB. I don’t think it would make sense to make a poll for them if no one is voting for them at all anyway, but, like Storynexus, I will do so if asked. Some of them do look very fun (one is like 100K words) but my chinese still isn’t good enough to really get a clue what’s going on.
Amongst the bitsy games, some are made with its variant binksi (e.g. In Girum), which integrate ink. But as far as I can see, they only appear in the “bitsy” category on IFDB.
The same might be true for some of the Unity games.
(I haven’t checked, but I think there also were an IFComp game mixing TADS and Twine?)
Hmm, I’m not really sure about the bitsy vs ink distinction. But recently we had a poll on this and people said they wanted to be able to vote for any game they personally felt fit a category, so if someone wants to vote for a binksi game in both categories (or vote for hand me down in both categories), that would be fine. The categories are not mutually exclusive, given the precedent of Inform 6 and PunyInform.
[Edited - sorry]
Last year I tested several PunyInform games with the Ozmoo interpreter to see if they ran decently during start up on a C64-emulator running at normal speed. I then tagged the games retro-machines on ifdb. I don’t have so much time this year so my thought was that we should recommend to make a retro version available, for instance a d64 image but that is just an example. It shouldn’t take long with Ozmoo though. Then it will be easier for us to tag the game retro-machines.
Edit-comment: I changed my wording as I actually think that voters should decide if the game they vote for is eligible by voting for it. Anyone can add the tag “retro-machines” anyway. I just personally would like to make sure if the game I am voting for actually runs on a retro-machine, e.g. it might be too large etc(?)
If there are PunyInform games which lack a PunyInform tag, we should tag them. There are none that I know of, and I try to keep an eye on this, but maybe I’ve missed one or two.
@fredrik.ramsberg, I wasn’t sure if you responded to my post so I just want to emphasize that there is both a PunyInform category and a Retro Game Award which is broader than PunyInform. For the retro award we used tag “retro-machines” last year.
I’m making the current polls, and right now only 2 games are tagged retro-machines and published in 2023. So right now only 2 games are showing up in the suggested search. Games don’t have to be in the search to be eligible but it would help make retro games more visible if they got tagged!