Starting out...

A bunch of demos have been released as part of Introcomp, the IF competition that's looking for "the beginning bits of the best IF game ever."

As for me, well, I'm working on something. I'm just not sure what.

"Good Morning, Mr. Phelps."

I gave myself a schedule for this thing. I'm not running behind, yet, but I'm worrying about scale.

What I want to do this week is to get the structure of the game in place, from start to finish. This is actually my normal modus operandi, and, without going into why I did something different this time, I think getting this done will do a lot to take the pressure off.

With the skeleton down and sorted, it's just a case of fleshing it out, and if things don't get fleshed out as much as they could do, well, no biggy. But right now I'm slogging along at a slow pace and looking at a finish line that's a lot further away than I want it to be.

So this is my short term aim. Although there's a million-and-one other things I need to worry about as well.

You didn't hear this from me, but I'm starting to make progress on something.

XYZZY Me, XYZZY You

The XYZZY Awards ceremony was held yesterday. I didn't win anything, but Walker & Silhouette was nominated for Best Writing and Best Player Character (Ivy), and Dead Like Ants was nominated for best NPCs.

You can see all the nominees and winners at the IFWiki page.

Six-Chamber Champion and the 371-in-1 Pirate Kart

For some reason I decided to do the 371-in-1 Klik & Play Pirate Kart II: Klik Harder event this weekend - at least for just the one game. The idea is definitely for quantity over quality, and games must be completed within two hours - so I just knocked up this short game of chance.

It's far from perfect, but in any case, you can find two hours of my hard work at the page for my entry here.

I've also got a zip containing an updated version - and a .t3 version for you non-Windows types - here.

And finally, why not check out the other entries tagged with Interactive Fiction?

Updates:
Version 2 - fixed a few typos and bugs.
Version 3 - gave the thing a general polish, changed some things that were bugging me, anticipated a couple of silly actions.

SPAG 57

Issue 57 of SPAG is out here. There's a nice review of Walker & Silhouette right at the bottom.

For the record, I haven't played King of Shreds and Patches yet, and I now might understand why some people were able to figure out the 'murder weapon' in W&S so easily...

Still Alive

Hi there. I suppose I've kind of taken the past month off, but I'm starting to gather together my plans and get cracking again. I've got a couple of different collaborations on the horizon, as well as two ideas for IF games that I finally want to try and get done. Looking further ahead, I do intend to go back to Ivy and Nate - but I want to work on other stuff first, to prevent W&S burnout.

And in the short term, there have been some interesting text games by other people over the past couple of months that I want to mention here, as soon as I find the time and energy to sit down and play them.