PyramidIF

I have captured the actual award bits of the ceremony, bolding categories and winners with some surrounding "crowd noise" for atmosphere, and calling out quotes from award-winners.  I apologize if I missed any particularly enjoyable exchanges or bon mot from the Peanut Gallery. The complete transcript is available here .

Unimatrix Productions is set to release it's first game produced with the  Storycentric Worlds development system on April 25th. As the possessor of a new Windows PC, I was fortunate I was able to have a look at the demo and see what Storycentric can do. Lifestream's interface resembles some early CRPG setups. Lifestream is a point and click horror adventure about a son and a father, lapsed religious beliefs, and ostensibly mysterious supernatural realms. This whole package gave me a very John Saul's Blackstone Chronicles vibe with (non animated) node travel and a spooky old house. The interface draws heavily from CRPGs with tabs for inventory, a map screen, journal entries, and player stats with the current objective listed. There is a compass rose with clickable buttons to navigate. The entire presentation feels solidly implemented. The game installs with all the gravitas of a studio title. Art is presented in variously-sized panels and the buttons thump with...

I was honored to participate in the 21st IFComp and place 19th with The Baker of Shireton .  This post will probably be rambly and disjointed as I'll discuss my experience creating it.  There might be spoilers, but I think I can use one of those break things right?  Oh here it is...I don't want to take up too much space on Planet IF if it works...okay here goes nothing...

I just tried to log onto Storynexus after a good number of months of not doing so, and was quite saddened to notice that they have removed the "Create Your Own World" button that was the front door into the author tools.  Storynexus allowed authors to create choice-based quality-driven card-drawing epics with a limited version of the tools Failbetter Games used to create  Fallen London (née Echo Bazaar.)   If you've played those, or perhaps one of its ugly step-relatives ( Kingdom of Loathing or Legends of Zork ) you might be familiar with the style of narrative presented in increments which limits play to a doled-out number of actions that recharge slowly over time, or more quickly for a subscription or varying small fees.

CONTENT WARNING - THIS GAME CONTAINS DESCRIPTIONS OF GRAPHIC VIOLENCE, AS WELL AS MILD LANGUAGE AND DRUG AND ALCOHOL REFERENCES AND SHOULD ONLY BE PLAYED BY MATURE PLAYERS Whoo, I'm already excited. I appreciate this. I'll have to find a senior citizen to supervise my play. Ahem . Just because someone is "mature" does not necessarily mean that content is appropriate for them. (Does "mild language" really warrant scary all-caps? Heck ! Darn ?) In fact, it's older people who tend to be judgmental of all the "pronography" that us "whipper-snappers" are "into". Despite that I am no longer a whipper nor a snapper of any type, we did kick up quite a bit of a tussle cruising in our jalopy rumble-seats to the malt shops and telling the owner what a "square" he was... But I digress; well-written content warning preambles are an art form. I'm ready to wade into the muck of the Mean Streets which purports to be  an ...

Endless Sands is an episode where the player is a vampire cast into the desert several hours before sunrise by someone whom they have wronged. The whole affair has the feeling of a mob hit by some kind of shadowy vampire mafia as in the True Blood series, or the Masquerade RPG. No real explanation of what you've done is given, and the resulting game is a timed "escape the region" puzzle. It has some really nice and original-looking cover art.

I must plug Steph Cherrywell's Chlorophyll because it's a lot of fun.  I beta tested parts of it so I won't be casting any votes, but  I love her zonky sense of humor and world-building sensibilities.  I hope it places nicely. Buster Hudson's Oppositely Opal is also a delightful piece, and so far I've got to say is probably one of the best examples of the type of game only a parser can do best.  The player must make experimental leaps of logic regarding how, why, and where to employ specific game mechanics which are infinitely more fun to experiment with than they would be if the options were spelled out in a list for the player to lawnmower through. Opal also provides the kind of humorous flourishes that only work when discovered by accident; something that just doesn't happen in a choice-based medium.