July 2025 PR-IF Meeting Attendees

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday, July 21, 2025 over Zoom. JP Tuttle, Doug Orleans, Mike Stage, zarf,  anjchang, Josh,  Matt Griffin (with special guest Gussie), and Hugh,  welcomed newcomer. Brad. Note: Thank you to these meeting notes written from notes by both Josh and Mike Stage.

NarraScope Impressions

• Matt ran NarraScope, and attendees shared positive feedback. Members are eager to watch missed talks once posted on YouTube.
• Some noted occasional difficulties connecting or staying connected via Discord to NarraScope’s talk channel

Discussion Topics

Videotome and Visual Novels
Josh referenced a 2022 piece by Freja Campbell on creating Videotome, a design engine for visual novels:

Blog post: https://itch.io/blog/454075/words-friction-syntax-stuff-i-thought-about-when-making-videotome

Matt discussed playing games built in Videotome. More info: https://communistsister.itch.io/videotome

Recent Games and IF

Mike highlighted the release of Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer, a sequel to the 2016 point-and-click detective game Kathy Rain, available on GOG and Steam.

Josh shared several IF games he’s been playing:

sweetfish’s games: https://sweetfish.itch.io/

Night Confessional: A mechanical phone-booth confessional automaton game, winner of Best Narrative in the NarraScope showcase.

In Other Wordles: A shifting Wikipedia page about Wordle.

Eider Cake: Pixelated medieval manuscripts in Decker, featuring bird characters.

From ParserComp:

Swap Wand User (Neo-Twiny Jam, 500-word limit): Players swap equal-length words to unscramble sci-fi vignettes about memory loss. https://passerine.itch.io/swap-wand-user

Eye by Arthur DiBianca: A cryptic limited-parser game where players deduce the puzzle and rules. https://adibianca.itch.io/eye

Dan Fabulich created a hints page for Eye: https://intfiction.org/t/walkthrough-gradual-hints-for-eye-by-arthur-dibianca/75695

Poetry and Interactive Media

Matt recommended Nick Montfort’s All the Way For the Win, a poetic stunt for fans of three-letter words: https://penteractpress.com/store/all-the-way-for-the-win

Angela Chang showcased her 3D interactive VR poem about seltzer, where bubbles contain words that can be popped (erasure poetry) and the perspective can be changed: https://anjchang.com/seltzer/

Interviews and IF Competitions

Someone shared Manon’s interview with SV Linwood, who won IF competitions with games like Long Way to the Nearest Star, Dr. Ludwig and the Devil, and Cut the Sky: https://the-rosebush.com/2025/07/interview-with-sv-linwood/

Technical Innovations in Games

Hugh discussed GPU-hardware image compression formats, enabling smaller file sizes for standard images and reasonable sizes for very large images. This sparked ideas for detective games where players zoom into a large canvas to find clues.

This led to a discussion of Zarf’s process for digital implementations of Jason Shiga’s comics, such as Leviathan: https://zarfhome.com/leviathan/