Spring Thing is now open, with nine new games: six in the main category, three in the “Back Garden” area for games that aren’t in competition for prizes and have somewhat looser entry requirements. There’s a mix of systems, too — Twine, Undum, Seltani, Glulx and z-machine, and Ren’Py.
My contribution is a Back Garden game called Aspel, which is a realm in the choice-based multiplayer Seltani platform. As my entry blurb says:
Aspel is an experimental interactive experience designed for multiple players, featuring asymmetric information and collective decision-making. The text you see on the screen won’t necessarily be the same as what everyone else sees, so you’ll need to communicate with your fellow players in order to experience it most fully. To make that easier, I’ll be around to participate/host at the following times:
Tuesday April 7 at 8 PM British/3 Eastern/noon Pacific
Sunday April 19 at 8 PM British/3 Eastern/noon Pacific
Friday May 1 at 8 PM British/3 Eastern/noon Pacific…but of course people are more than welcome to arrange their own visiting hours.
At some point I’ll likely write something about the experience of writing for Seltani.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
Just noticed for the middle session, should that be Sunday April 19th?
Er — yes, it should. Sorry! I’ll fix here if you can fix there.
please do, i’m curious!
p.s. i really like aspel. i played it a few weeks ago and found you idling in the innermost chamber, which was like a bonus discovery. it made for a pretty cool tableau.
Ha, cool, thanks!
There’s quite a bit more content in the Back Garden edition than there would’ve been then, but you should have the basic idea.
I just wanted to say that the tour I went on was great! I hope I can play it again sometime soon. Maybe I could rope some friends into a private tour?
Sure! Aspel’s open all the time, and it’s supposed to auto-reset itself when it’s been empty and idle for at least 10 minutes, so unless someone is hanging out there, it should become replayable.
You can also always set up a private instance and invite others to it, though it’s kind of a pain to do so. You have to go to your study, create an age, add a portal list to it, add your private instance to the portal list, and set the “external” property of the portal list to “true”, which will give you a link you can provide to other players for that instance, then save the portal list. You should be able to all click the same link and arrive in the same private instance. I think.