Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: AFF Dark Sun

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Sibyl Moon Games: Your Game Idea Is Too Big (But You’re Making It Anyway)

In a recent post at intfiction.org, a poster asked for advice on a (very) complex text-based game they wanted to create. The postscript read:

Also, yes, I am aiming WAY too high, thank you for noticing, especially considering my complete and utter lack of skill, practice, and focus, but … Keep reading →

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These Heterogenous Tasks: IF Comp 2015: Arcane Intern (Unpaid)

Arcane Intern (Unpaid) (Astrid Dalmady) does pretty much what the title implies. Trying to break into publishing, you stumble into a hidden society of magic-users. It’s still a crappy unpaid job, but with more magic sigils and dragon baristas. Games that … Continue reading →

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Choice of Games: Try Bookburners from Serial Box, created by Max Gladstone

Max Gladstone, author of Choice of the Deathless, is working on a delightful new serialized (non-interactive) novel, Bookburners, with our friends at Serial Box. (Serial Box is like HBO for books: top-shelf writing in weekly episodes.) Magic is real, and hungry—trapped in ancient texts and artifacts, only a few who discover it survive to fight back. Detective Sal Brooks is a survivor. Freshly awake to just what dangers are lurking, she joins a Vatican-backed black-ops anti-magic squad: Team Three of the Societas Librorum Occultorum. Together they stand between humanity and magical apocalypse. Some call them the Bookburners. They don’t like

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Choice of Games: Ratings War — Win market share in the news wars of 2061!

We’re proud to announce that Ratings War, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, iOS, and Android. It’s 33% off until October 9th. Implant cameras in your eyes to win the news wars of 2061! Record your way through dystopian New Angeles, solving multiple murders and conquering the airwaves as you go! “Ratings War” is a thrilling 80,000-word interactive novel by Eddy Webb, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based–without graphics or sound effects–and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination. Outwit your rivals at

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These Heterogenous Tasks: Footnote: Francis Galton, Genocide and the Butt Sextant

OK. This is a complete tangent, it is not about any form of gaming at all, and it starts out with a mildly saucy anecdote about butt sextants and proceeds from there to the Holocaust. This is what happens when … Continue reading →

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IFComp News: Three new serial IFs by past IFComp champs

There currently exist no fewer than three in-progress episodic IF works by authors who have released top-ten-finishing IFComp works in past years. These are those of which I am aware, in alphabetical order (am I missing any?):

• 18 Rooms to Home by Carolyn VanEseltine (One Eye Open, 2010; Beet the Devil, 2011; Ollie Ollie Oxen Free, 2013) presents the same world with each chapter, except larger by one room (in the parser-IF sense), containing that much more possibility for exploration and discovery. The first chapter contains only the end of the story, and it grows backwards from there.

• Bloom by Caelyn Sandel (One Eye Open, 2010), is a lightly interactive hypertext about the gradual acceptance of one Andy Blumenthal, well into a lifetime of assumed-masculine gender identity, that she is in truth a woman named Cordy.

• Feu de Joie by Alan DeNiro (Solarium, 2013) puts the player into the role of a QA specialist testing a digitized catalog of century-old essays, just as things start to get a bit weird. Includes feelies, as well as some optional content for the player to discover elsewhere on the internet.

Worth noting: all three series are supported by their respective creators’ Patreons, the links to which you can find from the games’ respective websites.

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Choice of Games: VERSUS: The Lost Ones — Eliminate your enemies by stealing their powers!

We’re proud to announce that VERSUS: The Lost Ones, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, iOS, and Android. It’s 25% off until August 28th. Steal alien powers and absorb their memories! Can you outlast your opponents to escape from planet Versus? “VERSUS: The Lost Ones” is a thrilling 123,000-word interactive novel by Zachary Sergi, author of our best-selling “Heroes Rise” trilogy. Your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based–without graphics or sound effects–and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination. Become an interstellar warrior, gifted with

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These Heterogenous Tasks: IntroComp: Walker’s Rift

IntroComp is a long-running interactive fiction mini-competition with a straightforward premise: create the opening of an IF game, and then people vote based on how much they want to see the game finished. (Full disclosure: I’m married to the IntroComp organiser.) … Continue reading →

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These Heterogenous Tasks: Introcomp: Lair of the Gorgonath, Voltage Cafe

IntroComp is a long-running interactive fiction mini-competition with a straightforward premise: create the opening of an IF game, and then people vote based on how much they want to see the game finished. (Full disclosure: I’m married to the IntroComp organiser.) … Continue reading →

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Lautz of IF: Trizbort 1.5.9.1 – August Update – Now different shaped rooms

Time for another Trizbort update.  This update focused on one new feature in particular.  Now rooms can have different shapes.  This is something I’ve wanted to put in for a long time, and it was actually relatively easy to get in.  It has been a bit more difficult to get to work properly.  There is […]

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Sibyl Moon Games: Update to Table-Driven NPC Actions

After last Thursday’s article, Andrew Plotkin pointed out that I could have been using rules instead of activities. From his intfiction.org post:

 

“It will be simpler and take less overhead if you have a “rule” column and a bunch of one-off rules:

Code:

Table of Caleb  … Keep reading → 

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These Heterogenous Tasks: Fall of Magic

The immediate draw of Ross Cowman’s successfully-Kickstarted storygame Fall of Magic is that it’s a really cool artifact: the game comes as a physical scroll of silk-screened cloth, which you unroll to reveal a map as the story progresses. The act … Continue reading →

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These Heterogenous Tasks: Out There Ω

Out There Ω is a resource-management space-exploration game. A more straightforward way to describe it – the influence is fairly obvious – is as FTL without combat. A lone astronaut, displaced by mysterious forces, has to make the long trek home. You gather resources and … Continue reading →

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These Heterogenous Tasks: Shufflecomp Failure

With one thing and another, and to my great regret, I didn’t get a game made for Shufflecomp. Here’s some discussion of why, largely in the interests of Know Thyself, and because I think best in writing. (There’s also the … Continue reading →

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Sibyl Moon Games: Version control with Mercurial and Tortoise HG

ChoiceScript doesn’t have integrated version control. If I select three paragraphs of source code, cut them to move somewhere else, and then lose them out of the clipboard by cutting something else, then the only way to fix my mistake is with “undo”. And it only works if I … Keep reading →

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The Fourth is Strong with This One

It’s been a year since I announced my intent to reboot the prequels. The project is still alive. More to come. For now:   And just to celebrate Star Wars day, check out this amazing recreation of The Force Awakens teaser in paper: Add your opinion in the comments below. And don’t forget to like, […]

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Raconteur: Announcing Raconteur

Raconteur is “Undum with batteries included.” Historically, developing for Undum has meant doing a lot of your own tooling; writing tools to enable you to write your game. Undum’s flexibility and power have made it the engine that drove some of the most significant works in IF (The Play, Almost Goodbye). But it has always been relatively inaccessible. Undum is not the system of choice for writing straightforward hypertext games; it’s a challenging system to learn and use that demands the author build their own engine on top of it to drive their game logic.

Raconteur is a descendant of a library I wrote for my own use to write Mere Anarchy. I’ve polished it up (a bit; there is still work to be done) and given it a name, because I want there to be more Undum stories out there.

Raconteur is a library of Undum tools that can get someone writing their story quickly. It tries to push Undum in the direction of Inform 7 and Twine, a system that puts the prose front and center.

Undum will never be quite as easy to use as Twine – Raconteur itself introduces some complications for the less technically-minded (It depends on Node.js, for one thing). But it’s an attempt at averaging out the power and flexibility of Undum with the ease of other systems. And for IF authors (or aspiring IF authors) who know a bit of web development, it’ll be a very familiar set of tools.

What it Does

Raconteur’s heart is a new way of defining situations, Undum’s equivalent of Twine’s passages or ChoiceScript’s scenes. This new situation prototype is paired with a new API to allow writing Undum games in a style that resembles Twee/ChoiceScript more:

situation 'pulpit-shop',
    content: """
 # Summer: Mr Pulpit & Co, Purveyors

 A profusion of odd junk lines the shelves, high up and out of reach. The
 room is narrow like a spite house, bisected by a hardwood counter. An
 antique cash register, set aside for a real one. Mr Pulpit, himself narrow,
 has a shopkeeper's smile from behind the counter.

 [Tell him what you need.](tell_him)
 """ 

You write content in Markdown, not html. Using CoffeeScript (Or ECMAScript 6, if you’re into that) instead of plain JavaScript, you get cleaner syntax and Ruby-style text interpolations that let you insert arbitrary expressions into your text:

situation 'counting_money',
    content: (character, system) -> 
        [gp, sp, cp] = calculateCoins(character.sandbox.money)
        """
 You count your money. You find that you have #{cp} copper pieces,
 #{sp} silver pieces, and #{gp} gold pieces.
 """
    choices: ['#continue_adventure'] 

Wherever possible, Raconteur treats code that produces text as text. There’s no separation between situations that just print some static text, and situations that print dynamic text.

Added to that is a set of tools for generating adaptive text (Similar to Inform’s [one of] functionality), defining html elements with specific attributes to reuse in text, and some common hypertext functions.

state_statement = 
    oneOf('The machine is quiet.', 'The machine hums.').cycling()

situation 'laboratory',
    content: """
 #{span('The machine hums.').id('machine_state')} It has a big red
 #{a('switch').replacer('machine_state')} on the side of it.
 """
    writers:
        machine_state: (character) ->
            character.sandbox.machineOn = !character.sandbox.machineOn
            "#{span(state_statement()).id('machine_state')}" 

What’s Included

Raconteur’s actual source distribution, on Github, is really only meant for people who want to develop Raconteur itself. For now, the way to get Raconteur is through the game scaffold which contains the following pieces:

• A set of scaffold files that you can edit to start building your game right away; unlike the example game that shipped with Undum, they are mostly blank and more explanatory.


• A Gulpfile (Which is similar to a Makefile or a Rakefile), which configures the gulp build system to automagically build and package your game, and even start a server so you can view it and test it on your local machine or anything else on the same wi-fi network.


• A package.json file which lists dependencies. This allows you to do npm install from the scaffold and have everything you need in place.

Where it’s Going

Raconteur is still in an experimental state. It’s usable, however; you can download the scaffold right now and start playing with it or even building games.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be posting a series of tutorials on writing Undum games with Raconteur, as well as a more navel-gazing explanation of why Raconteur exists, on my own IF blog. You can reach me through Twitter, Github, or intfiction.org.

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Storycade: Jam: Adventure Jam

The Adventure Jam starts tonight. Hosted by Cassie Benter and Stacy Davidson, the two week long jam focuses on the broad world of adventure games. The jam starts tonight (4/3) and allows participants to have a fairly open concept of what an adventure game is. We’ve seen adventure games grow and evolve so much so […]

The post Jam: Adventure Jam appeared first on .

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Sibyl Moon Games: Processing Feedback

The first time I got feedback on an interactive fiction game, it hurt terribly.

Back in college, I insisted on submitting science fiction to creative writing professors who officially disliked genre fiction, so I already knew people wouldn’t always like my work. I already understood that X% of the feedback … Keep reading →

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