The Gamebook Feed: Emily Short: End of May Link Assortment

Emily Short: End of May Link Assortment

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Upcoming events

June 2-4, it’s Feral Vector in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire. I will be there, talking about interactive narrative. Many other people will be there as well.

June 2, 7 PM, you can hear Matt Sheridan Smith talk about his game You Can’t See Any Such Thing in Brooklyn.

June 4, 1 PM, the SF Bay IF group meets.

June 14, 7 PM, the Oxford-London IF Meetup is meeting in London at the Failbetter headquarters to talk about IF and other media.

June 23, the Oxford Festival of the Arts includes some general game content and (at 7 PM) a panel with various Oxford-based indie games folks. Not specifically an IF event, but likely to include some interactive narrative components.

Upcoming Comps and Jams

Discworld Open Jam runs through July 28, and welcomes any works inspired by or set in Discworld.

June 18-25th, I’m running Bring Out Your Dead. Do you have a work-no-longer-in-progress that is gorgeously broken? Massively overambitious? Too niche to finish? Bring it, lay it on the pyre, let us gaze upon its face.

The rational explanation: good science looks at failures as well as successes. This is a chance to learn from one another’s quirky experiments and colorful failures, extremes of interaction that just didn’t work in practice, and other items that the IF community might find archaeologically interesting.

The emotional explanation: sometimes it feels like the hard drive is filling up with unfinished, unfinishable things, and it gets in the way. This is a chance at midsummer, before the height of comp season, to make a final use of those items and clear them out of the way, leaving mental space for the projects that are still viable.

Post-mortem comments and author notes are welcome, and so is checking out and commenting on other people’s work.

New Releases

Robin Johnson’s entertaining choice-parser hybrid Draculaland is now available as an app for Android.

Hadean Lands is coming to Steam, and will become available June 20. There is also DLC! Namely, a certificate in which you swear to solve the game without hints. I can’t decide whether this is genius or cruelty.

And this is not a new release, but Daniel Stelzer’s puzzle-rich Scroll Thief has received significant updates to puzzles. If you haven’t played it (and possibly if you have), now might be a good time to look.

Craft

Failbetter editor Olivia Wood gave a VideoBrains talk about sex writing in games and its pitfalls — with particular attention to Sunless Sea.

Business

Alexis Kennedy is leaving Failbetter Games. Failbetter has had a huge effect on the interactive fiction landscape, very much thanks to Alexis’ initiating vision. The company has of course grown to encompass a great deal of other talent, in writing and editing and community management and other areas, and I expect it will continue to be influential for quite a while to come. But it will be fascinating to see where it goes, and also what Alexis does next.

Elsewhere

IF author Caleb Wilson (Lime Ergot, Starry Seeksorrow, The Northnorth Passage, and others) has a short story coming out in this Swords v. Cthulhu anthology.