TThe People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Friday, April 29th on Zoom. Zarf, anjchang,   Kyrill,  Brendan Desilets ,Hugh, Mike Stage,andStephen Eric Jablonski attended.  Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.

Group play-through of Beam Me Up Scotty

We enjoyed playing Strand Games’ Beam Me Up Scotty for Spring Thing. It’s a catch phrase game where you type in the answer to what you want Scotty to do in different situations. All the phrases are start with B and we had fun! Has anyone seen a catch phrase game like this before?

Could do another game based on Casablanca. “Play it again” phrases that start with ‘P”?

Mike asked about the language platform (Strand). Hugh explained that it is custom flow-based code. ( We also talked about “vi” and vi commands, since that’s Hugh google name for his Spring Thing entry. ) Hugh gave us a walkthrough of the source code to the Beam Me Up Scotty game. He showed us the token language that he’s designed, which was quite interesting in the way many objects and dialogues were configured. Check out the blog describing how he builds the games for Strand Games.

Discussion on how he authored the character dialogs to scale for larger games. At the bottom of his latest post, youu can download the work in progress game for Roger The Pirate. The post also goes into detail on the story code and flow of RogerThePirate. Thank you Hugh for sharing your game!

What else we’re playing

Kirill played “Imagine Lifetimes” a satirical simulation game about the meaning of life. Also mentioned Storyteller puzzle game released last month on Steam.

Are there other spring thing games. Mike played a hog farming by Adventure Snack called Your Post-Apocalyptic To-Do List. Mysterygame (hugh) space pirate. Galaxy Jones talked abbout. There’s still time to nominate games for Spring Thing Ribbons, deadline May 12th. Go Play!