Friction

Play This Thing! is running my review of Gimme Friction Baby. (Not interactive fiction, or anything close to it.)

Child’s Play review

IF-Review has my review of Child’s Play up now.

Assorted News

There is indeed an IF Art Show again this year; deadline, May 2.

Play This Thing! is reviewing Photopia (not my review, this time, but I thought people might be interested).

Jeff Nyman has another interesting post on his IF classes, this time on why his next class will be using TADS 3 rather than Inform 7.

Grandtextauto points to Hypertextopia, a program especially for the creation of “axial” hypertexts — there’s one main line of narrative to follow, with what might be considered footnotes, expansions, or embellishments. I wasn’t thrilled with the couple of examples I briefly looked at, but it represents a possibly-interesting alternative take on how hypertext design might be done.

Still Alive

For months now I’ve been hearing about the astonishing storytelling power of Portal, along with its fabulous physics and game design.

I hardly ever play mainstream commercial video games — I don’t have the hardware to run it well, for one thing — but I was really curious about Portal, so recently when I got a chance to play it on friends’ XBox, I took it.

What follows is spoilery and also probably doesn’t make that much sense unless you’ve played.

PC Plus article out

The current issue of PC Plus (in the UK) is carrying a tutorial I wrote on interactive prose and description. (Code samples in Inform, but the design advice applies to other languages as well.) This is one of two; the second piece, on action design, is due (I think!) for next month.

Another Play This Thing Review

Play This Thing is now running my review of Treasures of a Slaver’s Kingdom by S. John Ross.

Two small things

JayIsGames gave a brief mention to To Hell in a Hamper: the use of the cover art there is a good sample of how outside bloggers would like to be able to show off IF. (Not that I’m obsessed with this at the moment or anything.)

The XYZZY awards were yesterday! Congratulations to the winners and nominees.

A really intriguing post on IF and storytelling

Jeff Nyman has written up some experiences using Inform 7 and TADS 3 with authors new to IF (or at least new to IF programming) and their responses about storytelling this medium and the specific tools involved.

Deluxe Doors extension

Added a new extension:

Allows for doors that are implemented as having independent ‘faces’ — to put a knocker on that can only be seen from on side, for instance, or to allow the player to lock one side with a key but the other with a latch. Also introduces a ‘latched door’ kind.

Your journey begins at the giant mushrooms.

In general I am in favor of narrative in games. However, a trend I totally do not get is that which says we should glue a framing fantasy story around some completely abstract puzzle or arcade game-play.

For instance, I just spent an hour or so with an angular-shooting game called Sparkle. Not great, not terrible. I had some fun with it on the higher levels of the demo, but not so much fun that I want to buy the complete version of the game.