The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction

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

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Wednesday, July 28, 2021. Zarf,  Hugh,  Dana, KaySavetz and Carrington (Eaten By A Grue), anjchang. attended. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:

We’re in summer!
Zarf’s playing Blaseball https://www.blaseball.com

Blernsball in Futurama (multiball)

Mooksball the running joke in Gene Wolf novels

Europa Universalis Four

Lethis Path of Progress

Have you heard of a PunyInform game called “duck! me?”

https://neurocracy.site Dana shared about this murder mystery set in 2049 on wikipedia. Another wikipedia game to play, “Press random and always hit first article, you’ll always hit philosophy“

Closer to IF comp time

Parsercomp voting runs into july

Another mysterium fan convention, the working Myst port to Apple 2 is finished!

Kay & Carrington KansasFest happened! This year’s buzz- an Apple 2 game in unity with virtualized Apple 2, Next year July 19th-24th mark your calendars.

Kay read Meanwhile, and bought the App. Looking for disparities between print and digital version.
Zarf shared his story of working on it with Jason Shiga. On the digital version, the giant squid has to be reached by selecting squid panel manually.

Kay and Carrington — Zork Zero being played on Eaten By A Grue “It’s kicking my butt” says Carrington!

Should interactive fiction support note taking or map making?
Hugh exploring map making- what’s the ideal map? What about running to the edge of the paper?
Carrington puts forth helping the reader with a “hypothetical map orientation suggestion”
Hugh what about up of down, how do you know where you start on that next paper.
Rooms help you keep examining every object all at once. Hadean lands, room count function of number of items in the room description.

Zarf on his drag & drop IF project, redid the interface based on tabs rather than fake, tiny windows in the web browser. He submitted a proposal talk about it to Rogue Like Celebration in September.

Working on 1933-era C memory management compiler project

Angela working on coloring duck story for parents to read to their kids.
Chicory, cartoon puppy with paint brush. It’s a children’s story talking about deep topics.
Baba Is You is technically a parser based text adventure. A block pushing parser, zarf & anj enjoyed it.

Cool Gear: Steam Deck
Kay’s excited about getting a PlayDate

Kay messing with ffmpeg

Carrington likes that PunyInform Game Development is simple

Narrascope call for volunteers will be going out sometime in November

Zarf shared a home decoration poster— is it filled with clues to zarfs next game! Love it!

Hugh used Inkscape, recommends Affinity Designer as a graphics package.

We imagine a game “Get back to Normal, the COVID game” Lolz all around!