Submissions for Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2023 have now closed and the games are now available to be played and rated.
Just to refresh your memory, the aim of Text Adventure Literacy Jam is to present text adventures (or parser-based interactive fiction) that are suitable for beginners to the genre. All games include a tutorial.
There were seven submissions this year, with three potential late entries in the next two days. There is quite a mix of formats, so plenty to explore. There were three Adventuron games, one Inform 6/PunyInform/Z-code game, one Quill/Z-code game, one PHP game and one Twine game. The latter appears to be the wrong file, so we are waiting for the author to fix this.
You can see all the submissions on the Submissions page. Voting closes on 30 June 2023.
Even though this is called a jam, it is actually a competition with some very generous prizes up for grabs, so please support the jam by playing and rating all the games.
Not promising any reviews, but I’ll head over to the TALP pond and see what I can fish out. I’ll measure the size of my catch with 1-5 arm’s lengths.
We do this scene all the time! Every time we order something really boring, like dog food, and it comes in the mail, we shout, “The new dog food is here!!!”
Nice! For full style points, I guess you could announce to your dogs beforehand “I’m going to get you a bag of dog food so big you’re going to puke.”
And, of course, they don’t WANT to puke.
(I assume it’s bags. Because anyone quoting The Jerk, of course, must really hate cans.)
What a tasty-looking selection of games - literally, in some cases! Nice to see some familiar authors back again as well as some new people, and Adventuron strutting its stuff all over the place (n.b. other authoring systems are available; they’re just not quite as fun). I see that another entry has appeared, so now there are eight.
There has been one disqualification, so we’re back to seven.
We had a few people that were very close to finishing, but not quite ready to submit, so we allowed an extra two days for late entries. You’ve seen one. We’re expecting one more Adventuron entry and (hopefully) one more non-Adventuron entry. I’ll let you know when the entries are finalised.
Since the original post, we’ve had one disqualification and three late entries. The final list of games (in alphabetical order) with direct links to the game page is:
Following @Denk’s lead, I have added all the other entries to IFDB. I have also added a competition page to make it easier to find all the entries. Feel free to add reviews and ratings on IFDB in addition to rating the games at itch.io.
We have 60 votes so far! I think a neat goal would be to get a higher average than previous years.
In 2021 we had 102/10, or 10.2
In 2022 we have 173/16, or 10.8125.
Now we have 60/9, or 6 2/3, but we have more than half the judging period to go.
To the organizers: would this be a good place to drop a “hey! I voted in all the games!” post, if people want to? Or maybe it would be better on itch? Not for huge recognition or bragging, but people who get through everything do deserve a bit of credit if they want it, and getting this topic bumped might be a good small reminder to people who’d like to judge.
I’m hoping for at least 10 votes per game, but a lot more would be a lot better. There tends to be a rush at the end, as a lot of people (including me) don’t vote until they’ve played all the games. I keep a running sheet as I go and make sure that all the games are voted fairly with respect to one another before casting my final votes.
For those that haven’t voted yet or are unsure of which game to play next, don’t forget that there is a link to see the submissions with the least ratings. You could play the ones with the fewer ratings first. (Embarrasingly, mine has got the lowest number of ratings at the moment.)
Incidentally, as I’m a prize donor and organiser, I’m not elligible for any prizes, so don’t let that influence your voting.
