I’m very pleased to announce that the 2024 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction is now open!
This year, there are thirty-three games, spread across three categories. Authors chose whether to submit games to the Main Festival, where they are eligible for ribbon nominations and the prize pool, or the Back Garden, which opts out of ribbons and prizes but has looser entry requirements (including allowing excerpts from unfinished or commercial games).
(This is a new subcategory this year for Back Garden games that have previously been released but have been substantially revised or ported to a substantially different platform. It may be folded back into the Back Garden next year, or remain as a separate entity).
You can play the games and find out everything you need to know about the festival at the official site.
Instructions for making ribbon nominations will go up in a couple of days. There are two kinds of ribbons this year:
A Best in Show blue ribbon, for Main Festival entries. The top two nominees each year win a Best in Show ribbon to display by their game.
Audience Award ribbons, for all participants, which are suggested by nominators and can be anything they like: “Best Story,” “Best Parser Game,” “Personal Favorite,” “Alumni’s Choice,” “Cutest Vampires”… you get the idea.
The festival will be open for ribbon nominations until 11:59 PM EDT, May 11, 2024.
To all the players, and all the entrants, have fun!
I disagree with this comp becouse most of the games hasn’t a downloadable version to play offline. Nevertheless i will play those games I can download and expect to have a lot of fun.
I have to agree a ‘medium’ category might have helped here, but I have seen only ‘micro’, ‘short’ (and ‘full’), and ‘full-length’.
But player time might vary wildly. Manonamora zipped through my One King entry for IFComp in 15 minutes while Mathbrush spent 1.5 hours … (To be fair to Brian, Manon was testing my story mode…)
The 2023 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction features thirty-two new interactive stories submitted by authors working across the spectrum of text games.
Hi @Jade I seem to remember you had some issues playing the original version - well this new version has been entirely remade in Twine (with new features and story elements). You should find it a lot easier to play. I think @mathbrush has made all games available to download, but if you need the files for this game, let me know and I can PM you a link.
Yeah, we all had to include a downloadable version when we submitted to the comp (unless it had to be hosted on a server to function), so we should all have one available; if downloading the whole bundle of games becomes a hassle, I’ll put that version on the Archive separately so you can download it from there.
… (To be fair to Brian, Manon was testing my story mode…)