PyramidIF

Inform 7 allows an author to accomplish things in many different ways.  It's easy enough to make a dungeon full of rooms and doors and containers and treasures, but if we go much further beyond that, we have to work with creating rules. All actions in Inform have rulebooks which roughly correspond to phases of time it takes to perform the action.  The major three are CHECK - This is where Inform decides if an action can be accomplished. CARRY OUT - This is where the actual mechanics of the action take place. REPORT - After everything is done, this is where the parser can print a message confirming what has taken place. Three other rulebooks are built-in: BEFORE AFTER  INSTEAD BEFORE and AFTER slot where you'd expect, but INSTEAD is probably the most powerful and most mis-used due to that inherent power.  New authors often find the check/carry out/report sequence confusing at first, and will latch onto INSTEAD like Dr. Who's sonic screwdriver to ...

Now to find Bob the Hobo... So I made a loaf of bread last night and...hunh.  How did that get in there?  It must have been that other version of me stashed in the back room... (I added some space so this doesn't crash with the preceding article on Planet IF)

I'm surprised no one before this has thought to make a game out of George Orwell's 1984 . The novel includes a very game-able scenario in that the main character's profession is to change printed publications--and therefore history--by editing news stories to reflect positively on the government and slander its enemies.  This dystopian concept is actually frighteningly more plausible now thanks to the internet.  Witness Wikipedia, where well-intentioned editors often constantly battle to prevent vandals from changing details about real-world events and personalities, putting their own thumbprint on general perception. Redactor casts the player as an employee of the Ministry of Truth in the Records Department ("Minitrue RecDep" in 1984 's prescient stylization preference of eliminating extraneous words and syllables) and presents a slim time limit and rules of how a news article needs to change: You will have 25 seconds to rectify a newspaper article...

I didn't think I'd be interested in the non IF stuff, but some of it has been eye-opening. First is How to Kill a Project by Wertle, a game designer named Lisa, who has created a biographical Twine which explains some of her experience with creating and abandoning games.  A few of these are actually embedded in the Twine and playable.  Favorites are Death Jeopardy and Imperfection . It's interesting to see how certain game systems can be embedded in a choice-based story and inspires ideas such an interactive game map or a small physical puzzle or a graphical inventory.  The author's backstory is also interesting and this is an amazing use of Twine. Watch your ankles on those stairs. The second is not IF related at all, but has a very cool Portal vibe and an interesting concept.   Conflux's conceit is that certain 3D physical structures are incomplete until you view them from the correct perspective.  There isn't any documentation, but standard 3D co...

Lots of popular IF heavy-hitters have posted unfinished works to Emily Short's unusual Bring out Your Dead jam which lets authors put unfinished and "dead" projects on display. The jam is only on for about a week, so I don't know if these titles will be available or disappear afterward, so be sure go check out early experiments by your favorite IF figures such as Emily Short, Andrew Plotkin, Sam Kabo Ashwell, Caleb Wilson, A. Deniro, Carl Muckenhoupt, David Cornelson, Mathbrush, Laura Michet, Bruno Dias, Catacalypto, and possibly more as the six days of the jam progress. The jam is not restricted to IF so there are some other interesting game experiences on display.  Many other people are blogging about this, so I won't go on in detail.

I clicked on an email notification for the Humble Store that was slightly misleading: " Choose Your Own Adventure Bundle ," thinking it would have discounts on some Choice of Games (which are already ridiculously reasonably-priced) or things like 80 Days (which I already own, but I was interested to see a current discount price.)  On the site it's actually " Build Your Own Adventure Bundle" of graphical adventures which makes more sense. Humble is offering some wonderful classic and remastered adventure games for a few dollars each. If you haven't experienced some of these in the past, it's well worth checking out, especially for Broken Age, and remastered versions of Grim Fandango and the original Gabriel Knight .  All of these on offer are available for Mac and Windows, several are available for Linux, and Broken Sword 5 also offers an Android port. --Edited to add:  This sale will end on the 12th or 13th of June by my rough estimation, based o...

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 .