Spring Thing 2014 is up!

springthing.net/2014/

I’d never heard of ChooseYourStory so that will be interesting to see.

I hope to be writing reviews (and possibly notes from my last year’s project, which I’m still working on revamping) at

drdanstreetmentioner.blogspot.com

I can’t comment on the games I helped with until the end, but I will do so.

I’d be interested in other review links, too, so anyone who wants, drop em in.

Nice work to the organizer for getting stuff up and to all ten entrants for finishing their games!

Also, games are on IFDB but I bet I forgot some details or just typed stuff wrong.

ETA: other reviews (feel free to post them here–I can just add them later)

emshort.wordpress.com/ Emily Short
tmft.wordpress.com/ Tracy Poff
IFDB listing of games

Andrew beat me to it! [emote]:)[/emote]

This is the biggest Spring Thing ever, with ten games participating! A big congrats to all the entrants for making it to the finish line. Thanks also to all the prize donors and everyone who’s helped me through my first year as organizer.

Votes will open in a day or two, and the voting period lasts until May 11th. You need to play half of the games to vote (which means five games, this year). The IF Archive and Mirror links should be live within a day or two.

Enjoy!

Sorry to steal your thunder there, Aaron! I should’ve waited longer for you to post. I wasn’t sure how long was a good time.

You got the games out quickly & I can only imagine the logistical nightmares. So, um…chalk it up to judge or community eagerness?

It’s mostly chalked up to my memories of the agonizing wait between submitting a game and the start of the comp. [emote]:)[/emote]

Good luck to everyone else in it! I mildly regret having a completely unrelated pen name haha.

I’m curious, how will the winner be determined now that judges are only required to rate half of the games? Like, what would happen if a game gets a really high average, but wasn’t played nearly as often as some of the others?

Peter’s not going to be happy with the non-downloadable ones! [emote];)[/emote]

This is already how other competitions with more entries work. My understanding is that judges tend to do a pretty good job at distributing their votes around the available games.

That’s the calm before the storm! The agonising part starts now… [emote]:)[/emote]

… provided one’s game isn’t a Windows-only executable 8)

Predictably, I’m not. [emote];)[/emote] But those are ChooseYourStory games, and I’ve given up on those a long, long, long, long, long time ago, precisely because the games can’t be downloaded in any way. I have simply erased them from my perception. ChooseYourStory does not exist, because anything made there can not be conserved. Therefore I can easily ignore those entries.

Everyone else in the comp was considerate enough to include offline-playing files, so on the whole, it’s an improvement.

Anyway, I’m getting seriously tired of non-parser games anyway, so it’s two less things I have to drudge through.

Have I misunderstood the rules? I thought only new games could be entered into the Spring Thing, but judging from some of the comments for A Game of Life and Death, it’s been out since at least June last year.

Speaking of which, is anyone finding the online player for Weekend at Ruby’s super buggy? As in, I can make it through the first questionnaire and and the hit any key prompts, but it isn’t responding to typed commands. Could that be my browser?

I don’t think so. At the game’s own page you get:

I’ve seen this on a few games. I guess the online interpreter simply isn’t 100%. Now that Alex is stepping out of Quest, it might stay that way.

So this might be my cue to say “As you see, download-offline play rulez and it roxxors yr soxxorz”. But I don’t feel like it. Mostly because I don’t really know what it means. Also, I have no wish to rule anyone’s socks.

Rock your socks, surely? You don’t want to rock my socks?

I would have gone to download this as soon as I saw that note (well, if I hadn’t been initially starting it up to see if it was parser or link-based), but the Windows-only thing.

Thanks for the heads up on this. The online Quest player isn’t 100% for some things, so I’ve emailed Alex to try and identify the problem. I’ve got a couple of leads which hopefully I’ll be able to sort out tonight and update the online version. (The original intent was to develop the standalone player to be cross-platform compatible but unfortunately we simply ran out of time.)

(I hope this post isn’t breaking the “you may not publicly discuss [your game] or any competitors’ games during the judging period” rule, I just wanted to inform players who required the online version that the issues were being addressed. If so, I’ll delete the post.)

Hi Liam, thanks.

I’d just like to make a plea that, if any changes need to be made to make the online version playable, that they’re allowed, since otherwise this game will basically be unplayable for non-Windows users. (And I’m not sure whether it would’ve been possible to test the online version given the “no release before the comp” proviso.)

The game was first published in a much smaller version last year (over 600 pages smaller, apparently!) after which the author took it down and spent a while completely revamping it. They contacted me about this and we agreed the new version was significantly different enough to be okay under Rule 8 (it mostly feels like a new game).

EDIT EDIT EDIT: I’ve changed my mind twice… after updating Gargoyle with the ALAN slot-in on my Mac, Gargoyle definitely doesn’t launch anymore. I’m running Mavericks 10.9.2, and Gargoyle works fine before the update. So if you try the update I describe below (on any platform?) back up Gargoyle first. And I guess we need to tell the ALAN implementor.


If you use Gargoyle to play The Wyldkynd Project, make sure you download and install the updated Alan 3 beta 4 slot-in for Gargoyle first.

It’s important to do this because if you boot the game in the Gargoyle which has been on your hard drive for awhile (which supports the previous version of ALAN) it may appear to work, and you’ll think, ‘See, I didn’t have to do anything after all,’ - but behind the scenes you may be heading towards buggy play or more.

The Windows slot-in (or alternately, a basic ALAN text interpreter) for the latest ALAN is here: alanif.se/joomla/index.php/d … category/7

The Mac slot-in (no standalone interpreter available for Mac) for the latest ALAN is here: alanif.se/joomla/index.php/d … category/8

The Linux slot-in is here:
alanif.se/joomla/index.php/d … category/9

-Wade

The online version of “Weekend At Ruby’s” has been updated and should now work.

Cool, full marks for speed. Is the offline version also updated, or was the update just a fix for the online version to play correctly?