IF Feed Aggregation

There are an increasing number of IF-related blogs, and now they have their own Planet, so you can find and follow all the news at once. Check it out — and if you also have a blog you think should be included, notice that the right-hand column includes contact information for Christopher Armstrong, who put this together.

Wiki-based IF Design

I’ve been asked to announce, for people who might like to participate or look on, that The Guardian’s gameblog is doing a group IF project. The language of choice is Inform 6, but it looks to me as though it’s possible to participate in a non-coding capacity as well, if I6 is not your thing. I have the impression that they would be glad of participation from some IF veterans.

The project is due to be officially launched tomorrow, but there is already content at http://textadventure.org.uk.

Other Interactive Fictions: Dreaming Methods

Dreaming Methods is a site I ran into over the weekend because it tags itself as interactive fiction. Which it is, if you take that term in the most open-ended way. Each (of the stories I tried, anyway) presents an environment made of panning still photographs; with a mouse you can direct movement across these photographs as though you were turning around in a room, but the range of motion is limited. In each scene there are a few hot spots to click on.

Meanwhile — defying the sense that this is a very budget sort of graphical adventure — lines of text float through the environment at various distances. Sometimes they appear far off and small; sometimes, so close to the viewer that they are out of focus, hard to read. The effect is like encountering unacknowledged thoughts, things that one has never brought into focus in one’s own mind. It’s unsettling.

The two stories I tried (Capped and The Flat) are short, atmospheric, with very little in the way of plot; only a slowly unfolding discovery of past events. I never did feel that I understood The Flat; Capped makes sense if you’ve seen the Tripod series, but probably not very much otherwise. On the whole, these seemed to me to have accepted a hypertextual idea of what interactive fiction can be: most often an exploration of thoughts and memories of past events, with little or no foreground action.

104…

What do you know? I was wrong: we did pass 100 cover art images. And there are still several days remaining (and several items on the requested-covers list).

Cover Art Drive — Deadline Approacheth!

We are nearing the end of April, and thus the end of the IF Cover Art Drive. At the moment, we have some 79 entries on the Flickr site. (For a while I thought we might even hit a hundred, but that seems less likely now. Still, if you’d like to make a last minute push, I promise to… uh… be very impressed. Oh, I’d be hopeless in a Telethon, wouldn’t I?)

[Edit: The list of requested covers is complete! Thanks so much to everyone who made this possible. The drive doesn't close until Wednesday, though, so if there's still something from IFDB that doesn't have a cover and that you'd like to contribute for, go ahead and send it my way!]

Rameses at Play This Thing

…now up here.

A small exercise

Apropos of recent discussions on RAIF about writing quality, telling compelling stories, and hooking the player fast:

Occasionally I find it worthwhile to stop and write a four- or five-sentence book-jacket-style blurb for my work in progress.

This sounds kind of cynical, but it forces me to identify right away what I think are the main hooks of my story. What is the protagonist’s initial problem? How does it change? Why do we care? Having those things in mind is useful as I’m planning the game, especially the opening scenes and the prologue text. If the blurb is weak, that often means I haven’t made the initial motivations compelling enough — so then I get to think through how to strengthen them a bit. Or if the blurb is good, but it’s describing things that don’t become obvious until well into the game, maybe I need to rethink the way I’m telling the story to put more of the hook right at the beginning.

I don’t claim this technique is the solution to all our storytelling woes, but I find it helpful, so maybe other people will too.

Spanish Cover Art Project

A neat thing: the Spanish IF community are also doing a cover art drive!

I don’t know what that game is with the man in the top hat, but it looks awesome.

Partly so that I can find this again later

but also because I think others may be interested:

A commenter on Play This Thing! posted a link to an article on story-telling in Bioshock, and then I wrote a long and rambling answer.

Jay is Games reviews Lost Pig, with online play

Jay Is Games has reviewed Lost Pig, and they’ve got a new Flash interpreter hooked up to let people play the game in their browsers.

Compared with playing on Zoom, it’s not so fast and smooth as I’m used to… but it’s not bad, and it’s certainly a fine way to introduce the casually-stopping-by crowd at JIG to new pieces of IF, without asking them to download anything extra.

Haven’t attempted a systematic comparison with the other recent Flash-based Z-interpreter, Flaxo.