vivdunstan

Fellow cat lovers may want to check out "Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight", an entry in this year's Spring Thing festival of interactive fiction games. This one is a traditional parser text adventure, where you play a cat, who has to help your person explore a mysterious theatre. You get extra points for doing cat like things. It's delightful. And very newbie friendly.

Revising the interactive fiction section of my website, postponing my next IFComp game to 2026, not later this year. On plus I have a really good design worked out and it's well in progress. But it's bigger than I'd initially planned, and I want to give it enough time to develop sufficiently richly. Postponing the game entry to 2026 gives me lots of time to develop all of its chapters much more fully. And also to allow for at least a couple of rounds of thorough playtesting. I'm really excited by this new game design, and want to do it justice. Allowing more development time should really help!

Good bit of game design, planning out more of Chapter 4 of my latest parser interactive fiction / text adventure game. This time I was figuring out some plot structure in Twine, before coding in Inform 7. Figuring out obstacles, story beats etc. Have also been looking at ideas for Chapter 5. I'm designing/coding multiple bits at the same time. There will be 7 chapters overall. Quite a lot bigger than my previous game.

Especially pleased to manage this today because I've been too asleep all week to tackle it before. But finally got a good bit of game design work in! I was adding all the bottom half of this diagram today.

Nice write up about my latest IF game.

Brainstorming a new IF game and came up with 10 very rough ideas. One calls out to me the most strongly, but I may also include elements of another five. That should be enough for getting on with! Much to do, but excited. As with the last one I want to get the bulk of the design in place before coding. Many months of slowly musing over ideas to come.

Sending out my IFComp 2024 game for its final round of playtesting. Scary and exciting at the same time! Also tomorrow I will be officially registering to enter the competition.

I'm nearing the end of getting my latest competition interactive fiction game ("Bad Beer") ready for its final round of playtesting. At the moment it's 13,363 words of Inform natural language source code. It will get a little longer when I add more customised responses to standard commands (one of the last few things to do). But not much longer. It is going into IFComp 2024 in August.

By comparison my 2018 IFComp game "Border Reivers" is 18,926 words of code. Though much of that is in tables for conversational responses: 7,000+ words for those alone. My 2020 Spring Thing game "Napier's Cache" is 23,181 words of source code.

"Bad Beer" is a modest game in scope, but is still deeply implemented. At least it was manageable in the time I had!

Just quickly coded an afterword for my IFComp game. I always think something like this is nice, to decompress after playing. And for the author to have a chance to say a few more words to the player after playing. In less than two weeks I'll be submitting my intention to enter this summer's competition. Getting real!

After being offline for years, the play transcript of the ClubFloyd folks playing through my interactive fiction / text adventure game Napier’s Cache is back online. I loved seeing how the players tackled my game. This game was inspired by a true story in my family history, involving mathematician John Napier. It was so much fun to write.

Blitzed lots more game coding overnight. Now just have to draw up a walkthrough and instructions for playtesters, and then I can send out the recruitment call for volunteers. Going to leave it a day or two before doing that to give me a bit of a break, and a bit of distance. But delighted to get to this stage. This is my latest interactive fiction / parser text adventure game, that I'm entering into IFComp this August coming.