PyramidIF

OH MY GOD I AM A BLOB. I'm liking the author's voice and tone, there's a whole fictional company with games like You Have to Put the Noun in the Other Noun , which is a series.

EctoComp is a SpeedIF contest…with a little bit of a twist.  Normally SpeedIF gives authors a set time limit to complete an entire game.  EctoComp loosely enforces a three-hour time limit, but the time needn't be consecutive - meaning a person can stop the clock so long as they are not typing on the keyboard.  A whole game can be planned on paper, so long as there is no copy-pasting of text from another window.  One supposes for Inform they someone could sneak a lot mechanics into an extension…but it's a very informal comp.  Three hours of coding AND beta testing.  Period.

The Stanley Parable is a really interesting short game available on Steam.  It is a first-person exploration that plays with the idea of player agency and the concept of free will as it is implemented in computer games.  The new version is an expansion of the original free Half-Life mod, and contains all new art and music, and brilliant honey-voiced British narration by a guy I wish would read me a story every night before falling asleep.  With all the meta-commentary and magical realism, it gives off very strong Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy vibes, with a dash of Portal .  For me, this is vibe heaven.

I can't believe I don't hear about people who use Inform 7 also using  Trizbort .  The name sounds like a Zorkian spell word, and it might as well be one for how awesome it is functionally.  It's PC only, which is one reason it took me so long to try it.  It's billed as an interactive fiction mapper, and it can produce a map based on a transcript of a game that is fed to it.  It can actually do this live if the interpreter produces the transcript on the fly during play.   I haven't actually used it like this though. What I do use it for is to lay out the general geography of my Inform projects.  Trizbort amazingly also works backwards .  I don't think this is a top-tier bullet point of the program but it should be:  An author can easily drag and drop a map in Trizbort and then have it spit out an Inform or TADS project or text to paste into one that does all the room creation and connections automatically.

I had a chance to check out the Indie/Twine game my father's long, long legs and thought it was pretty well done.  It's a good example of the story types that work best on Twine. In this case, there's not a whole lot of back and forth deciding on what to do.  You're advancing quite long passages of story (which are very well written) and then only at the end are you dropped into sort of a climactic scene where you have decisions.  Not story decisions, but pretty much it controls how long the tension is drawn for. Worth checking out.  It reminded me a lot of the stories I had seen on Creepypasta, and is a good read if you have an hour to spare for Halloween shivers. Spoilers after the break.

There are a lot of Twine games out there, and it does a lot of cool things and is really popular. My main concern with Twine is I don't like the way the default output looks.  I know you can change it, and I know you can do all kinds of tricks, but my main goal is readability. I've discovered AXMA Storymaker , which is a whole lot like Twine, but is wrapped up in one nice package similar to Inform.  It also seems to have a lot of built in features that you have to script by hand in Twine like real-time timers and such.  I think currently you have to use a separate compiler for Twine, and AXMA has one button that quickly compiles and lets you test the story which is really nice.  Disadvantage for some: you cannot tweak the HTML in the free version, but for me that's a plus.  You do get to adjust the text and choose white, sepia, or white on black similar to an e-book reader though, and the player can change this as well. The output is much more book-like th...

Wade Clarke reviews FINAL GIRL . In response to his confusion about saving on StoryNexus, saving is not necessary.  StoryNexus remembers where you are in each world and picks up right where you left off. I think that's okay to say since it's about StoryNexus and not the game.  

Yes, it's incredibly old school I guess.  I'm using a free WIX website which has nice round edges and friendly buttons so someone like me who knows just enough to be dangerous can't destroy the whole goshdarn internet with a misclick. I had been using a weird proprietary app to do the blog on my site, but it requires editing and republishing the whole website.  I think the app that connects to Blogger should just stream automatically.  Fingers crossed!