The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction

NickM,  Zarf, KaySavetz  (Eaten By A Grue), Hugh, Stephen Eric Jablonski,  Dana,  Mark Pilgrim, Kathryn Li, and anjchang (late) welcomed newcomer (William) Joe Durkin. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:

IFComp is underway!

Star Saga 2: The Clathran Menace (being scanned for archive.org)
https://www.blackgate.com/2019/11/04/vintage-bits-star-saga-an-innovative-hybrid-sci-fi-computer-rpg-series/

https://www.jesperjuul.net/text/gameofobjects/ — academic paper presented in playable form.

Hugh recovered Temple Of Disrondu, a 1982 BBC Micro game (ported to TRS-80)
http://bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=3836
https://strandgames.com/blog/temple-of-disrondu

Hugh showed off his “spineboy” demo rendering of runtime for web!
Spine (Esoteric Software) https://stvle.s3.amazonaws.com/spineboy/index.html?story=spineboy.str

Discussion about depiction of gore for better ratings

It’s November, so Nanogenmo is on

Notable IFComp games – 4×4 archipelago procedurally generated discovery game
Kidney Kwest education and reinforcement for young kidney patients
The last night of the Alexisgrad two-player IF, you and your partner each take on the role of a leader of a great nation on the last night of a war. 

Mention of Gold machine (http://golmac.org/) a blog of playthough of infocom games, more emphasis on the
literary analysis side. A recent post covered Zork – who is the thief here? You’re doing everything the thief is but you’re despoiling things.

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday, September 20, 2021 over zoom.  KaySavetz  (Eaten By A Grue), Zarf,  Hugh, Stephen Eric Jablonski,  Dana, NickM, Hilborn, welcomed newcomer Steve Washington (@esaevian). Thank you Zarf for providing the chat transcript below:

EctoComp 2021 has been announced: https://itch.io/jam/ectocomp-2021-english

Trope Tank is still hoping to get set up this month. MIT has set up a “Tim Ticket” system for campus visitors, so it might be possible to have an on-campus meeting in Nov or Dec. We’ll see.

(Footnote from Zarf: Even if this is possible, I am thinking we should stay with zoom meetings through the end of the semester. We can re-evaluate for January.)

NM is working on a new Curveship (JS) release — focusing on narrative style rather than parser-style IF.

Nick Montfort to Everyone: Curveship-js 0.4 coming soon!

Hopefully some version will be fun to develop & create stuff with before long

Adam Sommerfield posted about an abandoned attempt to work on a Deadline sequel with Dave Lebling and Marc Blank.

https://intfiction.org/t/cancelled-project-spiritual-successor-to-deadline-witness-etc-may-be-of-interest-to-someone/52525

Hugh set up a repository and did some very quick map sketches for this:

https://gitlab.com/jkj/39years

Talked a bit about different detective game models.

Kay Savetz to Everyone:

Puny Inform v3.0 is out — https://twitter.com/FRamsberg/status/1440011822313185280

https://github.com/johanberntsson/PunyInform/releases

Experimental work adding WebAssembly output to the Inform 6 compiler:

https://intfiction.org/t/inform-6-says-hello-webassembly/52399/12

This is very preliminary; not much of the I6 class system is implemented yet.

Emily Short ran a Seltani jam: https://emshort.blog/2021/08/22/seltani-jam/

Zarf was the only person who contributed anything, but we had about a dozen people show up for a Seltani tour.

Zarf’s post about the new experiment:

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2021/09/a-plenitude-of-alchemical-domains.html

Andy Baio posted about a lesser-known Jason Shiga interactive comic, Hello World:

Jason Shiga's "Hello World" is a devious interactive comic/puzzle with three game modes and an inventory, split into two halves where you flip pages and follow lines to tell the story. I bought it directly from the artist, who hand-made each one. I've never solved it. pic.twitter.com/Pl1cD3jluv

— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) September 16, 2021

This uses a split-page system to track game state and permit a “menu” of different choices in each state.

Also mentioned Knock Knock (Zarf showed off his copy).

Zarf also showed Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider(Aaron Reed, Anastasia Salter, John T. Murray).

Ryan Veeder’s Mud Warriors has been ported to GameBoy:

https://intfiction.org/t/the-release-of-ryan-veeders-mud-warriors-on-gameboy/52534

Screenshots:

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 pic.twitter.com/bCLXMm4O1A

— Ryan Veeder (@rcveeder) September 18, 2021

RYAN VEEDER’S MUD WARRIORS drops this Tuesday, featuring:

– VIOLENCE
– ANGST
– FUTILITY
– LOSS OF INNOCENCE
– SEPIA pic.twitter.com/4Nwh3U4b3e

— Ryan Veeder (@rcveeder) September 18, 2021

Gameboy emulator:

https://www.bannister.org/software/kigb.htm