!!! IMPORTANT: This year’s submission deadline is March 30! Emails with submission instructions went out yesterday. If you are registered but didn’t get the message, check your spam folder.
Spring Thing is almost here! It’s a very exciting time of year for many playesr and authors. What is it? From the official website:
Held annually since 2002, Spring Thing is a smaller, more informal counterweight to the busier fall Interactive Fiction Competition. Over the years, games have often debuted here that went on to become influential in the IF world or larger indie games scene.
Rather than a competition with rankings, the Thing focuses on bringing together new text games of all kinds: choice-based stories, gamebooks, hypertext fictions, visual novels, text adventures, narrative roguelikes, and wild new experiments.
Are you ready? Some important dates:
March 30, 2025: Deadline for entries to be submitted.
April 2, 2025:Festival opens and entries available to play.
April 9, 2025: Ribbon nominations open.
May 9, 2025: Ribbon nominations close; ribbon winners to be announced shortly.
Some of my favourite games, series, and/or PCs (Weight of a Soul, the Lady Thalia-series, Lil’ Ragamuffin from Guttersnipe 1: Carnival of Regrets) were entrants in the Thing.
(BTW: Weight of a Soul made a grand impression in its year of Spring Thing, with its attention to detail, nifty implementation, suspenseful story, and broad and moody setting. Today it’s hardly ever mentioned anymore. Next time there’s an event like People’s Champion, I’m selecting it.)
Apart from discovering at least one mindblowing game each year (either by judging that particular year or by going through the history), I also love the whimsical style of judging (Ribbons! Yaay!), the freedom of the Back Garden, and the looser focus on game length.
I’ve never run the table for any competition. I usually max out around 20-25 games. This year, I will surely do my best to play and judge at least that many entries.
I’m excited, but am not sure how much opportunity to get to actually (apart from anything else, I’m still working on the game I demoed in the Spring Thing Back Garden of 4 years ago). I always enjoy seeing how the ribboning process goes though, even for the ones I don’t get to play.
I marked this day because I have found an interesting cutting point in the narrative of Isekai which can allow moving up the first public beta from the end to the middle of this year. (there’s more about it in the dev diary)
I am excited! I’ve tested some great games and am looking forward to playing new ones. Not sure if I’ll review this year, but I’d enjoy chatting in per-game threads like we did for last IFComp! I entered the IF community via Spring Thing two years ago, so it’s a fun personal anniversary for me, and I hope to enter again at some point.
My feeling is revered silence. Knowing that something important is to happen, again. I enjoy checking my smartphone several times a day to hunt for the reviews. Spring thing is my Alma mater in IF, so each time it is, as Tabitha says, an aniversary - and an aniversary worth celebrating.
I’m a bit frustrated with the slowness of my entry. It will get done but probably go in the back garden. I feel like I’m forcing this one through a bit, and I’m worried it may be too hard or weird, but it is worth writing.
The bright side of the slog is, when I’m derailed from programming it, it’s generally to write up other projects.
Hi Brian, I´ve just found out that pictures in one of the games (Wonder of the Woods) doesn´t show propperly. I made them smaller in size and posted an update to your e-mail. Could you please swap it with the debugged one?
I can! I’m at work now so I’ll do it when I get back later. I have about 8 tasks left before Spring Thing should be ready to open tomorrow, and that’s one of them!
