OSX; Zoom plus Omnigraffle for mapping. Have had ugly crashes from Spatterlight but only minor crashes from Zoom. Pretty much an ideal setup, IMHO.
iOS with iPhone; Frotz. Main limitation is lack of TADS terp in Frotz; with TADS capability, Frotz would be excellent, not merely very good.
It’s too bad IF can’t find a way to “appify” itself. If titles could be packaged as $1 self-contained apps, I think that IF authors could probably make serious livings from the craft. But given the everything-is-free ecosystem as it’s currently evolved, this would appear to be an opportunity missed. It’s great short-term for players/readers, but long-term this starves the pipeline that lays the golden goose.
If an IF revenue model somehow causes authors to produce hackneyed crap, you’re absolutely right.
If on the other hand it allows those with real talent to write as their primary job and produce works of sophistication and interest, then how is that not a good thing? Zarf appears to see the value in finding some sort of monetization for his IF. It’s too bad when someone of Emily Short’s stature has to attribute a lack of recent IF production to the intrusion of “real life.” Regular output from Zarf, Emily, and the many other luminaries because IF is their day job, not their hobby, could only be a huge advance for IF. IMHO.
Anyway, I didn’t mean to highjack this thread, though this sub-theme is relevant thus: if IF were packaged into easily and cheaply purchased apps running on the current crop of devices, I think IF would immediately and hugely expand its audience. And surely we’d all agree that would be a good thing.
I’m not sure that that would really make the difference in the commercial viability of the medium – if it did, somebody would undoubtedly have already done it.
Having said that, and commercialization issues aside, just as a matter of convenience I would love to see an easier way to package IF games as self-contained executable programs. There was some discussion of this a few weeks back; I believe the point was made that some systems do provide this capability.
I have also been distracted from the mobile/appifying problem by “real life”. Like Emily, my “real life” still consists of game-design work – just not IF specifically.
My plans for the winter involve getting at least Dreamhold out as a standalone iOS app. (Hadean Lands is unlikely to be done as quickly as the remaining interpreter technical work.)
I do interactive narrative design and writing for a living. Some of those projects are text-based, some aren’t, but I pretty much am doing what I want with my time, and being paid to do it, and that’s awesome.
The thing I was talking about was the conversation library, and it’s simply taken a back burner to other projects. That’s always a risk with hobbyist development, but then, even if I were making money from selling IF apps, it’s not clear to me that that would actually be an encouragement to finish and release the library. It’s in a state where it’s perfectly usable by me; the remaining work that needs to go into it is beta-testing, refinement and documentation to make it more accessible to other people. If this were a competitive money-making environment, I’d actually have a negative incentive to do that work.
If adding the line “Release as an Android app” worked in I7, I’d certainly do it because that’s one more outlet and outlets are nice … but it really wouldn’t change which games I charged for and which ones I didn’t, nor would it change my approach to design at all, or to my workday. I already make my living as a game designer in my home gaming turf (pen-and-paper RPGs) … IF will always be someplace I go 'cause I enjoy luxuriating in the process (even when “luxuriating” means “banging my head against the same coding challenge for weeks at a time”) and because it affords me greater freedom to be snide to the audience [not to be read aloud].
Honestly, I’d be much more excited to personally pay $20 for a rock-solid 'terp for Android than I would be to sell my own games as $1 apps. Much-much-muchly-much.
