The votes have been counted. The Commended entries, in alphabetical order, are:
An Earth Turning Slowly, by Mæja Stefánsson
Groove Billygoat, by Efrain Finnell (Hanon Ondricek)
HOLY ROBOT EMPIRE, by Ralph Gide (Caleb Wilson)
Light My Way Home, by Venus Hart (Caelyn Sandel)
Mirrorwife, by Virgil Caine (Yoon Ha Lee)
Monkey and Bear, by the opposite of sublimation (Carolyn VanEseltine)
More, by Erin Canterbury (Jason Dyer)
Sequitur V1, by Tin Foil Jenny (Neil Butters)
Sparkle, by Karly Di Caprio (Juhana Leinonen)
Tea and Toast, by Maria del Pangolin (Matt Weiner)
Congratulations to them all! (And really, congratulations to everyone who entered. The overall quality impressed the hell out of me.)
If you wish to unmask yourselves, do so in comments below; I’ll edit this post accordingly.
Amadeo Voss (Fallout Shelter) was Molly Geene
Bramble Bobonong (Out the Window) was also Molly Geene
Conrad Elton (Flotsam and Driftwood) was Peter Orme
Efrain Finnell (Groove Billygoat) was Hanon Ondricek
Elizabeth Jones (The Legend of Wooley Swamp) was also also Molly Geene
Erin Canterbury (More) was Jason Dyer
Histroy Gloam (Fallout Shelter) was Marshal Tenner Winter
Jed Brockett (A Summer Rose) was Adri
John Earthling (Truth) was Carl Muckenhoupt
Karly Di Caprio (Sparkle) was Juhana Leinonen
Lambert Lambert (Eight Miles High) was Josh Giesbrecht
Lankly Lockers (50 Shades of Jilting) was Rowan Lipkovits
a lost kitten (The darkness of mere being) was Marius Muller
L. Starr Voronoi (Cryptophasia) was Alan DeNiro
Maria del Pangolin (Tea and Toast) was Matt Weiner
Morrissey (Dead Man’s Party) was Royce Odle
Mr. Stamp (White Houses) was Jason Lautzenheiser
the opposite of sublimation (Monkey & Bear) was Carolyn VanEseltine
Pergola Cavendish (The Peccary Myth) was Gerardo Aerssens
Psychopup (Invisible Parties) was Sam Kabo Ashwell
Ralph Gide (HOLY ROBOT EMPIRE) was Caleb Wilson
Robert Whitlock (Look Around the Corner) was Doug Orleans
Summer del Mono (Illuminate) was Christopher Conley
Tin Foil Jenny (Sequitur) was Neil Butters
Venus Hart (Light My Way Home) was Caelyn Sandel
Virgil Caine (Mirrorwife) was Yoon Ha Lee
Many thanks, again, to everybody who helped out on this, whether through logistical support or just by making suggestions; but particularly to Rikard Peterson and Matt Weiner.
I wrote Mirrorwife. Which I think anyone who has ever played anything by me had already guessed.
I had the opportunity to use the pseudonym Sam Handwich but was, ah, convinced that it would be too divergent from the tone of the actual game…
Are post-comp releases supposed to go anywhere in particular? I have a couple of beta testers to thank.
Congratulations to everyone who participated, and thank you to Sam and the logistical people; I am sorry I didn’t get to play all the games before judging was over, but it was a terrific experience.
Emily, in private discussion: ‘I assume Virgil Caine is either Yoon or someone doing a very good Yoon impersonation.’ You are… not someone with a readily-disguised style, no.
Nope, you’re on your own now. Post-comp releases should go to the Archive or philome.la or whatnot.
Pergola Cavendish was I. Maybe this does not much surprise, I think the lol’s give it away lol. I plan to do a post comp version of “The Peccary Myth” sometime.
I hope to do a post-comp expansion sometime, possibly implementing butter and plates. In the meantime the source text is here.
Speaking of mattweiner.net, it might be a good idea to put the games onto the IF Archive if they aren’t up already, just so they’ll be archived somewhere besides my website in playable form. Thoughts?
Second this. I feel bad that I didn’t find time to read them all, but the ones I saw were impressive, and I’m looking forward to the rest! Thanks, everyone, it was quite the comp.
I’m Venus Hart [emote]:)[/emote]
I’m really glad that people enjoyed Light My Way Home; it’s my first attempt at a polished solo parser game, so I was a touch nervous XD
I was Lankly Lockers. This is my first I7 release (my first text parser release of any kind since two broken AGT works in the '90s) and I have to say, next time I decide to make an Aisle-alike, I’ll probably do it in BASIC instead of Inform 7: all the helpful default behaviour and responses become obstacles that have to be overcome (wrestling with which cuts into development time available to write and implement responses.) All the cons, none of the pros! (Well, the portability allows in-browser play, permitting me to disappoint more people more easily than ever before!)
A few apologies: the game-winning code was lifted directly from examples in the manual, and the underwhelming ending was successfully triggered in testing, and I don’t know why masochistically-dedicated players failed to see it after somehow managing to trigger all 50 hooks (and hats off to those who did!) Obviously, a post-comp release needs to happen. I was hoping to offer a pool of some 75 endings and proclaim the game won after 50 of them were found, but there just wasn’t enough time, which resulted in a very different kind of game (one in which obscure old in-jokes play a much more important role) as what intended. (Ultimately I think that some 150 endings will provide the impression of the game expecting all likely inputs; if I implement one a week then my post-comp release will go live in three years 8)
All the same, the experience of making 50 Shades was very educational and rewarding, and will lend me momentum to continue work on other interminable WIPs in more conventional IF forms. Thanks to everyone for giving me the chance to make it!
I was John Earthling of Truth. If anyone guessed this, it’s probably because they read the ABOUT text and recognized things I had previously said on ifMUD.
I readily admit that Truth was a stupid little game, and essentially a speedIF, coded at the last minute to meet the initial-submission deadline and not altered much after that. I had some more ambitious ideas about how to adapt some of the other songs on my list, but ditched them when I realized how little time I was going to be able to spend on it. But – and this is the key thing to me – at least I got something in. I still feel a little guilty about Cover Stories, where I claimed a picture and then didn’t do anything with it. So actually releasing something, however cursory, was important to me.
The one thing I’m kind of proud of with respect to my entry is infrastructural and invisible to the user: I set things up so I could flag any text as a lie pertaining to the current action’s noun simply by putting the substitution string “[lie]” in it. This is kind of an abuse of the intended use of substitution strings in Inform 7, in that it doesn’t print anything immediately but does have side effects, but it’s just about perfect as expressive coding.
I’m figuring out the best way to do this. (In the past, a lot of minicomp games have ended up only available from the Archive as part of a big .zip, which is obviously sub-optimal. Updates as events warrant.)
Just a quick note to let you all know that we played a few of these on ClubFloyd, and that all SC14 transcripts for games with authors who’ve revealed their identities as of the time of this post have been updated. We’ve played:
ClubFloyd will probably not play more of these, or at least we’ll wait for post-comp releases (as has been requested by Sam Kabo Ashwell and Roycle Odle).
If you’d really like to see CF play any other Floydable ShuffleComp games, drop me a note at my gmail: jacqueline.a.lott
