The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Thursday, March 26, 2026 over Zoom. Attending: Josh Grams, Doug Orleans, Stephen Jablon, Zarf, Allyson, hugh, pinkunz. Note: Thank you to Josh Grams for taking the notes and photo (edited by Angela).

Stephen is (occasionally) playing Moments Out of Time[1] with friends. Time travel game, replay a bunch of times to piece together what there is of the story? 2nd place in the 2001 IFComp.

[1]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=obx6l90zk794ef7m

We talked about ClubFloyd a bit: Ally has been going fairly regularly, Josh occasionally. They’re currently playing The House at the End of Rosewood Street [2]

[2]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=bse2t636ftkc6spj

Doug has been enjoyingRyan Veeder’sEnigMarch [3] puzzles (an event with daily prompts for the month of March and people try to make a puzzle each day). One of Ryan’s “puzzles” was he took a week and made a small IF game that involves cryptic crossword clues in a parser-game format? It’s called Stooping to Diplomacy [4]. All of Ryan’s puzzles from this year can be foundat his website[5].

[3]:https://enigmarch.com/
[4]:https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=hn9cmw2ldykbmgsa
[5]: https://rcveeder.net/enigmarch26/

Andrew Plotkin demoed The Visible Zorker [6], talked a bit about taking it to GDC, and showed a bit of the NPC movement tables from the upcoming Visible Deadline. Support the project on Patreon [7] to get access to the Deadline implementation on April 1st…

[6]: https://eblong.com/infocom/visi/
[7]: https://www.patreon.com/cw/VisibleZorker

Ally is working on getting The Apothecary’s Assistant [8] up and running again for the Spring Thing’s New Game Plus division (it has been unplayable without time-travelling your computer back to the 2024 IFComp).

[8]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=60bmufqvqaqav08b

Hugh found a physical copy of Infocom’s Suspect [9] and looked through the feelies, and we talked a little about different ways of getting people to unlock paper documents at various points in a game…
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspect_(video_game)