The transcript from last night is now available at emshort.wordpress.com/if-discuss … st-mortem/ .
Thanks so much for this. I couldn’t be there, but am really happy to be able to read the notes.
Thanks for the transcript!
Next topic (Dec 13): since people are busy at this time of year, we’re going with the low-prep topic of “New directions in IF”, which can be “here’s my specific concept I want feedback on” or can be “here’s my pie-in-the-sky notion”.
As always, details at emshort.wordpress.com/if-discussion-club/ .
As a first-time visitor to the last discussion, I enjoyed it and stayed longer than I thought I would. I hope to see new and old people there this Saturday!
It seems like we touched on the idea of getting an idea out there last session. The main concerns were not spoiling it for IFComp (e.g. violating the publicity rule) and also on not wanting to reveal enough for someone else to run with our idea better, while still getting enough feedback. This is tricky, but I know just saying “I’d like to do X some day” in a public forum helped me to, well, eventually do X. Whether with Inform or other projects.
As a participant, I found the free-form discussion without too many rules is very helpful, especially as I had a short outline of things I wanted to say. So I recommend that to new people, though it’s not critical. Maybe only a list of 3 things is enough.
Also, this may be looking too far ahead, but how often will these topics be repeating? I’m asking specifically because I have a lot of ideas about testing (if only on bit mistakes to avoid) that I would like to share. In any case I want to go on record saying I wouldn’t mind repeating a general topic, as I think we can focus on specific sub-questions without overlapping a previous discussion. I suspect other people would not mind, too(?)
Now, obviously, I could write my own blog posts on testing, and some of the details probably belong there, but the real-time chat helps you feel you’re not shouting into a void.
Glad you liked it!
Repetition: I don’t really know. Some discussion topics have had people ahead of time saying “YES LET’S TALK ABOUT THAT!!” but then wound up with comparatively low attendance, while others have worked pretty well; but at least so far I wasn’t really planning to start repeating topics. OTOH if you have a particular angle on testing that you want to discuss, that might make a more compelling (and not-too-repetitive) pitch. I do have at least one person who’s volunteered to organize a future session (that is, do some advance research, have some examples handy for the topic, and be discussion-leader for it). If you or anyone else also want to do that, I’m definitely interested to hear about it.
I’m annoyed with myself that I’ve not managed to make one of these-- hopefully next time.
Today’s session (or yesterday’s, depending on your time zone) is now live.
The major things we hit on in the discussion were: play-only-once IF; systems that preserved information about past player run-throughs; micro-IF, especially run on Twitter; multiplayer IF, and a number of practical questions concerning how that might work; a “point and click text adventure” UI concept, and the Texture tool.
The next meeting will be January 10, 2015; I’ll post with topic details anon.
Re: This Is A Real Thing That Happened:
Emily is right about the correct functioning - it displays a list of names rather than just one. Maga, it sounds like your ad block software has indeed interfered with game functionality. However, I consulted with my back end expert, and Dani thinks it should not be a problem from the sibylmoon.com version, only from the version at itch.io.
I assume TIARTTH uses a Javascript extension to do its persistent storage?
I wrote TIARTTH as if it were going to save to a local external file, and then Dani hacked Parchment to get it to send/receive results from the sibylmoon server instead of browser local storage. So essentially yes, but nothing so formal as an extension.
As noted somewhere in this thread, you can now partake of the discussion using a Jabber chat client (if it supports XMPP group chat).
EDIT-ADD: Ignore this. I misread a timestamp and thought someone had asked about MUD alternatives just now.
