Results for Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2026

Competitions
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Ding, ding, ding! Time’s up. The public has voted, the scores have been tallied and the results are in. I am pleased to announce the results of Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2026 as follows:

  1. The Gnomish Treasury by Lamp Post Projects

  2. Epic Expedition by dgtziea

  3. The Antediluvian Weapon by Daniel Stelzer

  4. Ransack! by Charles Moore Jr

  5. The Abbey of the Hidden Rose by Philip Richmond

  6. Big Deal, Oh! by Andrew Schultz

  7. Beneath the Exhibition by patricksgamecorner

  8. Adventure in the Crypt by Candy64

  9. The Pattern Beneath by Relei

The results and breakdown of scores in each category can be seen on the Results page.

Congratulations to all the entrants. As all the entrants win a prize, all the entrants are winners.

The quality of the games was very high, but I want to single out one game in particular. Epic Expedition stood head and shoulders above the rest as a beginner’s game. Although it didn’t win, it met the brief, was fun to play and had a very good tutorial. It is the perfect example of what a beginner’s game should look like and I’m not surprised that it rated #1 in the beginner-friendliness category.

The top six games were all great games in their own right. The bottom three games used custom systems or rarely-used systems and possibly suffered because of that. It is hard to write a text adventure. It’s even harder when you’re writing the engine that drives it.

Irrespective of their placings, the authors should be proud of their work. We had a number of authors who were making their first foray into parser-based interactive fiction, including the winner, I believe, and most of them did very well.

One thing I did notice this year was that most of the games were fairly difficult, so probably not the best introduction for beginners. We need to somehow address this next year. Even so, I hope all the authors enjoyed the experience, will learn from it and will return next year.

Thank you to all the wonderful people that played and rated the games. We wouldn’t have a competition if it wasn’t for you.

Thanks also to all the prize donors who generously donated over US$600 in prizes, and a special mention to our anonymous donor who not only donated US$200 for first prize, but also donated a free ebook to all entrants. Prizes will be sorted out as soon as possible over the next few days.

For those that haven’t played the games yet, you can download them and/or play them online at the links above.

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ParserComp 2026 - The Lamp is now lit.
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Congratulations! Great games!

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What is the difference between a game’s “Score” and “Raw Score” ?

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It’s some mysterious formula that itch.io applies. I did a search for this last year and couldn’t find anything meaningful, other than it’s their way of normalising votes. If anyone knows exactly how it’s calculated, I’d be interested to know.

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The “raw” score is the score as given by the voters, which is adjusted (downwards) for games that receive less than the median number of votes, using the following formula:

final score = avg_score * sqrt(min(median, votes_received) / median)

Sources: Post by leafo in Jam ratings calculation issue - itch.io and Post by leafo in Calculated ratings for jams vs raw scores? - itch.io

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Thank you.

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Oh, so 50% games get a score reduction simply because less people rated them? That seems really wrong to me.

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It seems really wrong to everyone, but that’s just the way it is and there is no option to change it. It’s why I try to get an even balance in the number of ratings. You can always try complaining to itch.io and have it ignored. They’re really good at ignoring complaints. The more people that complain, the better.

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Regarding the score adjustment, I guess they have to have some sort of system to handle games that have few votes. The average could be easily skewed one way or the other if you only had five scores, whereas if you had 100, say, some anomalous voting would not have such an extreme effect on the average. They could simply not count games that fell below a certain threshold of votes, but that would be very frustrating as well.

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I was thinking that perhaps an additional rating for ‘Effectiveness of tutorial’ might be a good addition to the scorecard. It seems to me that would be sufficiently different from ‘Beginner Friendliness’ to be worthwhile.

You could also perhaps give the categories related to accessibility for new players a greater weight in scoring so that authors put more focus on those aspects of the game when designing.

I haven’t yet played all the games, and I’m sure some of the tutorials are good, but of the four games I played, the tutorials were not that great. I acknowledge that making a good interactive tutorial is very difficult, on top of an already difficult endeavour!

The other problem is, it’s quite hard to judge a tutorial when you are not a novice player of text adventures!

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Thanks for the feedback. I agree that many things could be improved. There’s still a lot of behind-the-scenes things happening, such as distribution of prizes. When that’s finished, I’m going to have a rest from this for a while to clear my head. I may then do a post-mortem and seek ideas for improvement for next year.

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I just wanted to say thank you for organizing the jam. I had a great time building my very first text adventure, even if my first attempt did not exactly end in glorious victory and apparently aimed straight for last place :wink:.

I also really enjoyed playing the other entries and seeing how everyone brought their ideas to life, especially the different approaches people took to designing and implementing their puzzles. It was fun to see how varied the solutions and styles turned out.

Thanks again for putting everything together and creating such a fun event!

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Hope to see you again next year.

I think I’ve just decided on the theme for next year. I’ll do a little research first, then announce it with plenty of advance warning. I think it will be a fun one.

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While it is too late for this years contest, I added an offline Linux build to my submissions itch page. It is a proper tarball. After extraction ./MADCandy will launch it. Wine is not required. I’ve only tested it on my local Ubuntu.

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It’s a wrap! I think it’s safe to say that Text Adventure Literacy Jam for 2026 is now over, as all prizes have been distributed.

We had a few glitches along the way: one entrant’s email bounced, one prize donor was on vacation, one prize donor had just moved house and so on. We also discovered an issue with the distribution of ebooks from Amazon to some countries. These things are just intended to try us, but the lessons learned will help us to streamline the process next year.

Speaking of next year, providing his/her circumstances don’t change, our anonymous donor has already committed to donating a text adventure/interactive fiction/game narrative related ebook to all entrants again next year. Wow!

Once again, I would like to thank all the entrants for an interesting batch of games, all the judges for making this a terrific success and all the prize donors for their generosity.

Next year
The optional theme for 2027 will be “cartoon superheroes”, so you can start planning now.

I’ll write more about this when the competition draws closer, but please keep in mind that you must not do anything that would breach someone else’s intellectual property rights. Do not use any existing storylines, copyrighted material or trademarked character names. You can write a game that’s a spoof or parody of an existing superhero, or inspired by an existing superhero, but it’s better if you can invent a brand new superhero in the style of those you remember from your childhood.

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In the ParserComp 2026 - The Lamp is now lit thread, @andrewj suggested that the Results page should be kept private/hidden and the raw scores should be used for calculating the results, which are then provided in a public list or spreadsheet. I’ve worked out how to do the former and I’m happy to do the latter, but I’m curious about what everyone else thinks.

The pro is that we use the raw scores without itch.io applying its questionable dampening algorithm to reduce the impact of vote rigging.

The con is that the results will be delayed while I fill out a spreadsheet to calculate the results and everyone will have to trust me.

Out of curiosity, I filled out a spreadsheet for this year’s results to see what the impact would have been. Quite to my surprise, positions 4 and 5 would have been swapped, even though they were both affected by the score dampening algorithm. Also, positions 8 and 9 would have been swapped, even though position 8 was not affected by the dampening algorithm and position 9 was, so the former with raw scores actually suffered from the change.

So, what does everyone think? Use the raw scores or leave it as is?

Scoring for Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2027:

  • Use raw scores
  • Use adjusted scores
0 voters
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For adjusted scores, will itch’s formula be used? Surely there’s a better way to do it? Also, how will raw score be used to calculate the results, exactly?

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The raw scores are the average of the scores in the individual categories. The adjusted scores are the same, but after itch’s formula has been applied.

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Actually, I just realised that itch does the calculations for me and I don’t need a spreadsheet. It adds an ‘Overall’ score which is the average of the individual categories. So the only difference is that the final placings would be based on the ‘Overall’ score in the ‘Raw score’ column, rather than the ‘Score*’ column.

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Just in case I think you need a minimum threshold in case a game only gets 1 rating. Should a game with only one rating be able to win?

In IFComp the threshold is normally ten ratings but they have accepted 9 ratings at some point I think.

This comp should have a somewhat lower threshold as there are less judges. Perhaps 4?

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