Nov12
The Boston IF meetup for October will be Tuesday, November 24, 6:30 pm Eastern time.
We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.
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The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction
Boston's IF interest group
Play games from a list of Interactive Fiction titles selected by the People's Republic.
How Do I Play?
Not certain what to type first? Download our handy IF-for-beginners card:
Still not sure what to type first? Read A Beginner's Guide to Interactive Fiction.
Oct27
The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Tuesday, Oct 27, 2020. Zarf, kay (Eaten by a Grue), nickm, Josh Grams, anjchang , hilborn, Richard Lamb and Dave Thompsen attended. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:
Infocomp judging happening. Join the fun!
Taper #5 is out, check it out! Entries for the next issue, Taper#6 A Throw of the Dice are now being accepted due Jan 20, 2021.
Allison Parrish posted Inform7 tutorial recently on twitter.
http://catn.decontextualize.com/inform7/
Anjchang has been playing latex typing game
https://texnique.xyz/
Typing of the Dead great for the season!
Halloween Themed Comps
- Ecto Comp happening this week
- SaugusNet Comp and Ghost story contest.
Spring thing announcement
Josh shares Toronto’s hand eye society wordplay festival https://www.handeyesociety.com/wordplay/
Kickstarter of Erotic Interactive fiction has a stretch goal. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/slsl/strange-lusts-strange-loves. Natalia Federov and Anna Antropy in the mix.
Kay created twitter bots that run your code in an emulator and tweet it back. https://atari8bitbot.com/
Zarf took a fieldtrip to Corning Glass and Nervous Systems HQ.
Visionary video A Day Made of Glass
Nifty Gateway Art — People make small art and post on a website with proof of ownership in Etherium/cryptocoin.
Design Fiction Discussion
Reconstructing damaged Beta Disk on Inform game files.
Discussion about conventions of direction and room in games.
Room in caving is a space big enough to stand up in, not referencing architectural convention.Show and Tell with Books
Kay read two books on Sierra Online
- The Sierra Adventure by Shawn Mills
- Not All Tales Have Happy Endings by Ken Williams
Nickm showed Folio Society’s Tristam Shandy by Tom Phillips
Zarf showed BASIC Games book, kay had a link to the atari archive
Eliza discussion, Omnibus project podcast
What to Do After you hit Return
- https://www.amazon.com/What-After-You-Hit-Return/dp/0810454769
- https://www.amazon.com/After-Return-P-C-C-First-Computer/dp/B003MT39PO
- https://archive.org/details/Whattodoafteryouhitreturn
Schmoo?
Dr. Z, a poor man’s Eliza
Moore’s book
How you would write a starship simulator
(c) 1978 dilythium project
But does it cover the Manhattan distance calculations for game elements??
XCHG RAX RAX by xorpd
x86 assembly book
Ligatures and fonts
Prisoner’s Restriction no ascenders or descenders
Allison Parrish’s Beyond Z
Translation of other languages is hard
Oct27
The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Wednesday, September 23, 2020. Zarf, kay (Eaten by a Grue), nickm, Kyle Aulerich, joshua grams, anjchang ,Richard Lamb, David C Thompsen attended. Note: These notes were compiled by Josh Grams.
Zarf mentioned a PDP-10 emulation project that can now run Zork and the Crowther Adventure and Crowther/Woods Adventure, shared his screen for a bit of that.
Also that the PDP-10 Zork (?) that we have is a binary version, not
compiled from any of the MDL sources: there’s a project to get an MDL
compiler working.
Nick talked about his class and the challenges of virtual teaching: it’s
harder to play interactive things together and takes longer. 9:05, rat
chaos (https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=7wip22dpvlzil83), something
else I can’t remember?
There’s an Italo Calvino jam (“If on a summer’s night a game designer”)
that ends September 30th, Zarf showed a little of his entry, a 360-view
explorable of his newly-unpacked library with some interactive text and
inventory bits.
Nick’s mind chained to Robin Camille’s 2016 NaNoGenMo project _If on a
winter’s night a library cardholder_
Kyle Aulerich is one of the founders of Mythion Adventures (Nick shared
details on the mailing list). He’s been talking with Nick but this is
his first time checking out a PR-IF meeting.
Eric talked about the Saugus Ghost Stories thing briefly.
Richard Lamb talked about the challenges of trying to procedurally
generate dungeons on old hardware with very limited resources.
Inkle Studios’ new game Pendragon (board game/strategy game inspired
thing with narrative intertwined, of course?) came out maybe yesterday?