The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Tuesday, April 13, 2021. Zarf, , Stephen Eric Jablonski, nickm , Josh Grams, Hugh Steers, anjchang, KaySavetz and Carrington (Eaten By A Grue), Thomas Mack, welcomed newcomer Zed Lopez. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:
Kay an Carrington gave a talk last night for Joco Cruise, Jonathan Colton fans. on infocom text adventures “We Played All the Infocom Text Adventures.” Will be on their podcast soon. They are currently playing Journey (barely a text adventure game) right now. Their favorite one was Trinity and Kay liked “Hollywood Hijinx.” Carrington says “Trinity” or Mind Forever Voyaging or Bayou.
Flights of Foundary is happening. Zarf and many cool people are speaking. Packed with lots of talk.
Spring thing voting going on.
Parser Comp accepting registrations.
PunyInform game jam. submissions due in 19 days.
Thomas Disch’s Amnesia. Tom Disch(lots of work) also wrote the first of the Prisoner Novelizations. Portal interactive novel Rob Swigart
Nick gave us 256 perl script game “Ely” that you can type in your command line. We had fun.
perl -pE'BEGIN{say"you ok?";$p=" something$/"}$m=$_;s/.i(\047m| am| was)\b/really/i;s/.you./what about i/i;s/.always./can i be specific/;s/[?.!,].//;s/\b(i|me)\b/you/gi;s/\bmy/your/i;.2>rand?s/.*/huh/:s/$/?/;($_="you had said$p")if.1>rand;$p=": ".$m'People’s reactions to Aaron Reed’s blog 50 Years of Text Games. Right now they’re talking about Hitchhiker’s guide– was it a good game or bad sci-fi?
Douglas Adams was not very involved in Starship Titanic. Book mostly written by Terry Jones.
Thomas Mack played about 200+ games in one year. Read his blog with statistics analyzing his review sfrom playing all the games from IFcomp in 2019.
Discussion about what the experience of conferencing is during the pandemic. Demoparty experience, meetup format, during the pandemic. PR-IF is looking to return to the Trope Tank in September, hopefully.
Find the fish games
Visual novels. Text with faces on them
Zarf adding features to inform6 compilers.
Curveship-js update. Want to generate narratives in different languages.
Has Zilch ever been released? Yes, in some form. Discussed why Inform 7 filesize vs Inform 6.
In PunyInform creates such small files. It’s a separate library. Somewhat simpler parser and strips out class related features that require Z5/Z3 games. Discussion about interpreter and Inform6 language and OOP that are not necessarily native to the way Z machine works. Addressing in PunyInform is different.
Generative Unfoldings opening happened. Nick shared the repo for the exhibit’s open source code repository: https://github.com/nickmontfort/generative_unfoldings Many positive reviews of cursive dimensionality (Phillip Schmidt’s piece), hextal and pactracer, Check it out!