Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2025 is currently underway and submissions are open from 1 March to 30 April 2025. This is a competition with some generous prizes where the aim is to write a text adventure (or parser-based IF) suitable for beginners to the genre.
In last year’s competition, we had a few submissions that were clearly written by beginner authors that weren’t really suitable for beginner players. You really need to be an experienced player and experienced author to write a game suitable for beginners.
To address that issue this year, I added a section titled Is this competition appropriate for you? where I tried to clarify the requirements for prospective authors. I reasoned that an experienced player should know enough to appreciate the needs of a beginner, as we were all beginners at one time. If an experienced player wants to write a game for beginners, but they are not an experienced author, then I suggested that they should get a mentor to help them get started.
So, would you like to be a mentor? Are you an experienced author that would enjoy helping someone else to become an author in this wonderful hobby of ours? If so, send a response below and tell me what authoring language(s) you use. See the suggested languages on the competition’s home page. I can be a mentor to anyone wanting to use Inform 6, PunyInform or Adventuron classroom (but not betabeta).
We really need a pool of potential mentors for other languages such as ADRIFT, Dialog, Inform 7, ZIL and so on. We have a request for a Quest mentor, so if Quest is your thing, please volunteer.
There is no exam, so I’m going to trust that you’re capable of mentoring someone in your chosen authoring language.
You can also join the Text Adventure Literacy Jam Discord server to monitor any requests for help there.
I don’t think there will be many requests for mentors, but if there are and this works out well, maybe we (as a community) could set something up on a more permanent basis and extend it to include choice-based authoring systems.