Events
Today, October 15, there is a Los Angeles area IF Meetup adjacent to Indiecade.
Tomorrow, October 16 the Oxford/London IF Meetup is getting together to play a bunch of newly released IF Comp games. There will be readers; there will be snacks; there will be a lot of games.
October 19, Boston/Cambridge, there is a People’s Republic of IF meetup.
October 21 is PROCJAM Talks Day, a day of talks about procedural generation (of text and of other things). I will be speaking, as will many cool folks. The Talks Day takes place in Falmouth, but the sessions will be streamed, so you can catch them even if you’re not there in person.
October 22 is the deadline for the yearly Saugus.net Halloween story competition, which includes an interactive fiction section.
October 28, I’ll be speaking in Vienna at Subotron arcademy.
October 30 is the deadline to submit content to Ectocomp, the IF minicomp for Halloween themed games.
Voting for IF Comp continues through November 16. Voting is open to anyone not contributing to the comp as an author who is able to rate five or more games.
The weekend of November 19/20 is a double treat for IF and word game enthusiasts in London: the 19th is the one-day WordPlay event held at the British Library, and the 20th will see IF-related content featured at AdventureX.
New releases
All the IF Comp games, obviously! I’ve started writing about the comp at an overview level for Rock Paper Shotgun — and I’m not the only one writing up comp games there.
Reviews from other people are linked at ifwiki, and there’s ongoing conversation about the Comp at the euphoria &if channel, a The Short Game podcast, and some live playthroughs on Lynnea Glasser’s Twitch channel. Or if you really like keeping track of every possible detail, there’s even a huge spreadsheet that records which games have reviews from which reviewers.
Labour’s Letters Lost is the third in the Peterkin series of period detective stories by Christopher Huang.
Ladykiller in a Bind is Christine Love’s latest, a game around relationships, sex, and kink. Katherine Cross writes about its handling of that material.
Development and Craft
Bruno Dias has an audio log (appropriately) about doing the audio content for Voyageur, the upcoming space-exploration game with procedural text.
Gall and Blotter, also from Bruno, are designed to facilitate writing small/simple projects with inkle studios’ Ink tool and publishing them as HTML files.
Here’s Marc Laidlaw on writing for Half-Life: a file that has apparently been lying in a corner since 1998. It’s not about IF per se, but it’s very much relevant to the problem of mapping game writing to a large project, and the process of revision, in particular.
This YouTube recording presents academic/indie research on procedural storytelling from EXAG 2016.
Ben Gwalchmai writes about the Mr Robot game as a work of ambient interactive literature.
Publicity and Outreach
Youtuber Markiplier plays through The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo.
Jeremiah McCall writes about designing interactive history texts in Twine and Inform, focusing on educational contexts.
Felicity Banks gave a radio interview in Canberra on what interactive fiction is and how it works.
Upcoming
House of Many Doors has a Steam page now!
