Voting is open for the first round of the XYZZY Awards for 2022, here. We’re on a pretty short nomination period, so get those votes in by the end of Saturday, Dec 16.
Not much doubt about my votes for the main categories. I’m hesitant to fill in votes for “Best use of innovation” though. I don’t really understand what qualifies. Could anyone give some clear examples of games that would fit in this category? Preferably from 2021 or earlier, so as not to promote any 2022 (or later) games in these '22XYZZYs.
EDIT: Ugh… Dumb question. I can just click through to the earlier winners. Nevermind.
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It’s been so long, but I’d like to present two of my projects for consideration for the Best Technical Development category. These were both created and published in 2022, and of course have had some updates since.
The IF Archive Unboxing Service
The Unboxer allows you to easily open any zip file on the IF Archive to access individual files (helpful for the really big IFComp zips), as well as to play HTML files from those zips. IFDB now frequently links to the Unboxer, including for Play Online links (for both direct HTML files like for Twine, as well as to give a storyfile to Parchment), so you may have been benefiting from the Unboxer without realising it.
The Unboxer was my concept and I wrote most of it, though Zarf made some significant contributions too.
AsyncGlk
After several years of making small changes to GlkOte, I decided it would be best to actually make my own version. So I rewrote it in Typescript, organising the code in a way that works better for me. For example, the Gargoyle Glk extensions (for per-character colours), which I had managed to hack into GlkOte, are also supported, in a more consistent and stable way, from the perspective of the code. Using Typescript means that the GlkOte JSON protocol can be specified as a interface, so that I can ensure my code always produces valid protocol responses. The name comes from my plans for a future iteration that will be asynchronous, allowing more filesystem options than are presently possible (such as linking to Dropbox), though that part isn’t ready yet.
But the main significance of AsyncGlk isn’t that it’s easier for me to hack on, but that many long time issues have been resolved now. I had two main areas of focus for improvement: mobile browsers, and accessibility (mainly screen readers). Now that Parchment is using AsyncGlk these previous pain points are much improved.
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Saw that A Long Way to the Nearest Star is listed twice in the list. Don’t know if that’s helpful or not, but thought I’d mention it. Thanks for putting this out!
Also, for another technical development thing, Inform v10 was released last year, right?
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On the “Historical Results” page of the XYZZY Awards website, the links to the finalists and winners from 2008 and earlier lead to a casino site with either an “Online Slots Beginners’ Guide” page, or an “Oops! Not found” page within that same casino site.
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Great contributions! I would also like to propose in that category:
Frankendrift (official releases in 2022 and much improvement over the alpha releases in 2021)
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Another consideration for Best Technical Achievement: Eric Eve’s release of adv3Lite 1.6 for TADS. A long-awaited update to a library at the heart of several TADS games in recent years.
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FYI, to search for games that were released in 2022 and that you added to your
“played” list on IFDB, you can put this in the IFDB search bar:
published:2022 played:yes
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(What list are you referring to, here? I don’t see a list of games.)
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In the voting page, there are drop down menus and, below them, a long list of games.
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Oh right yes! I’d forgotten / never knew how that works; I thought you must be referring to something here on the forum.
(I did vaguely recall that the Xyzzies involved heroic list compilation, which I guess is probably a pain point for the organisers.)
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