What Zarf is up to, winter edition

I survived my month of a thousand conferences. Three conferences, which feels like a thousand when you put them in a four-week span. IndieCade was great! WordPlay was great! I also went to Practice, which was great! Then I was tired.

Between all of that and some assorted client work, I have had zero time to put into The Flashpaper War. Oops. So the "coming later this year" notice that I posted in May turns out to be a lie. Sorry! (This is why I didn't Kickstart it, right?)

I've updated the Flashpaper teaser page to say "Coming in 2016". I really intend to hold to that. Not least because Flashpaper was my "make some money on IF in 2015" idea. Money is awesome. I'm very keen on having some new IF for sale in 2016.

I'm still excited about Flashpaper as a game concept, too. Now that I've taken a three-month vacation from working on it, I can see that the underlying concept needs to be hit with the iteration stick a few more times. It got good responses at FIG, but it's not as catchy as I'd like. Flashpaper is unlike most IF that's out there, so it has to build its own market in order to be a hit.

In the spirit of setting expectations, I will say: Flashpaper is not parser IF. It will be an iOS game, or at least an iOS-first game. It was conceived as a touchscreen game from the beginning and that's how it will work best.

(Android may follow eventually if it seems worth the effort of porting. Yes, I say that about all my iOS projects. Nothing yet has been enough of a success to be worth learning Android programming. I live in hope.)

As for other projects: I still want to do Meanwhile for AppleTV. I took a quick stab at porting the iOS version over, but the scrolling didn't work right and then I had to put it aside for client work. I'll get back to it over the winter break.

I am also -- and don't take this as a promise but come on this is awesome -- looking at entering the Imaginary Games Jam. Registration deadline is a week from today.

And I need to sew elbow patches on my hideous plaid jacket. That jacket has been in circulation since 1987-ish. Getting a bit worn around the seams.

So those are my winter plans. Plus the usual round of keeping an eye on Inform bugs, thinking about IF libraries, hanging out, and generally messing around. The next Boston IF meetup is Thursday, by the way.

Looking farther out, I'm gonna be at GDC in March. I'm not giving any talks or anything, just visiting. It's been four years since my last (first) GDC trip, and I've met way more cool game people since then, so it's probably time to go back.

I hope to have more exciting Zarf-does-stuff news soon...

4000 pages of Infocom documents

I said 4000 pages of Infocom documents. You heard me, right?

These are paper records saved by Steve Meretzky while Infocom was operating. He saved them after the company fell down; he preserved them for decades; he let Jason Scott scan them while making Get Lamp. The originals are now at Stanford University. The scans (slightly edited to remove personal information) are now on the Internet Archive.

What's currently up there is all the design documents for many of Infocom's games. (I originally wrote "nearly all" but in fact it's seven of them.)

Further doc dumps (memos, email, schedules, business plans) will appear in the future -- they require more editing and permissions, since there's more personal information there.

Go nuts.

The Room 3: design ruminations

(Or "roominations", har har.)

I have finished The Room 3, third in the series of gorgeous puzzle-box games for touchscreen. I didn't know it was in production -- The Room 2 seemed to wrap up the storyline, such as it was -- but I guess the designers have decided to ride this clockwork train for as long as it ticks. I'm not objecting; this entry in the series is a satisfying chunk of puzzle manipulation. It's longer than the first two games put together, and it expands the original game mechanic into an explorable environment. (By offering an architectural space of rooms, and also adding a new "zoom into tiny sub-rooms" mechanic.)

I want to talk about one particular aspect: the storyline. In idle post-game chatter, I tweeted:

I can't say I think of these games as narrative objects at all. (--@zarfeblong)

That may sound nuts; how different is the Room series from the classically-narrative Myst series? Puzzles + journals = IF. But there must be a difference. When I said above "the storyline, such as it was", I wasn't kidding. I literally don't remember anything about the storyline of The Room and The Room 2 except that R2 seemed to wrap it up. And there was "the Null", but that's something that R3 reminded me of.

Pocket Storm for the new Apple TV

I'm happy to announce that Pocket Storm for the Apple TV is now available in the new Apple TV App Store. Apple's new set-top box ships today, and you can get your favorite thunderstorm on it.



To find it, open the App Store app on the TV's main screen, select Search, and enter STORM. (Or POCKET, or ZARF -- the text search is actually pretty good.)

Better yet -- if you've purchased Pocket Storm for iOS, you can download the Apple TV app for free! And vice versa. It's a joint purchase, which means you can buy it once and then install it on any iOS or tvOS device you own.

As always, I am donating 10% of Pocket Storm revenues to Freesound.org, because of the awesome service they provide to indie game designers and other artists. In particular, they provide CC-licensed thunderstorm noises to me!

Indiecade happened and it didn't kill me

We showed off Seltani at Indiecade! To lots of people. Lots and lots. Not everybody was interested -- it was, after all, a text game in a hall crowded with flashing lights and VR headsets -- but plenty of people thought it was worth a look. Some were Myst fans (or even Myst Online fans); some were old MUD users; some were familiar with Twine but had never seen a multiplayer Twine-like.

I gave out stacks of postcards with this map I did of the Seltani District (the game's initial hub area). It had the URL on the back, obviously. (Note to self: next time I reprint the postcard, boldface the URL.)

In a wiser and more organized world I would have a story to tell about Indiecade, but it's not, I don't, and I'm moderately exhausted in a hotel as I write this. So you get lists.

Videogame Hugo: 2015 potentials

Last month I posted about the idea of a videogame category for the Hugo awards.

A few days later there was a discussion thread on File770 (a prominent SF fandom news blog). The discussion was a good snapshot of community response to the idea.

The biggest objection was that there aren't enough good games to make a category worthwhile. People cited 15 to 25 as a desirable minimum. (The Hugos have a two-stage voting process. So you want at least 25-ish plausible suggestions for "best game of the year", which then get narrowed down to five finalists, which then get narrowed down to one winner.)

The petition that sparked that discussion thread went nowhere. However, I think it's worthwhile to put up a concrete list. The subject will certainly come up again, and I want people to be able to point and say "Yes, look, there are that many games every year!"

I'm going to focus on indie and amateur interactive fiction titles, because that's my field. I've got nothing against big-budget SF games, but you can get a list of those off any game-industry news site. This is the wider field of games which might not be familiar to the non-gaming SF fan. Most, though not all, are short games -- two hours playtime down to ten minutes.

I'm not saying that all of these games are, in fact, Hugo-worthy. I haven't played most of them! I'm gathering highly-rated titles from a variety of sources, including IF competitions and game-jams of 2015. (Special thanks to Emily Short's mid-2015 roundup post.)

(I do not yet include games from IFComp 2015, the big IF competition of 2015. That's still in progress and will be for another month. When it ends, it will certainly add another handful of titles to this post. I'll update then.) (Also still in progress: the Windhammer Prize for Short Gamebook Fiction.)

What Zarf is up to, autumn edition

Yes, I've been running quiet for the past couple of months. I've been working away on various projects. But soon I will enter a season of furious public activity! While also still working away, because the projects aren't done yet.

First, as I recently posted, I will be at IndieCade to show off Seltani. That's Oct 23-25 in Los Angeles. Extra thanks to Carl Muckenhoupt (Baf of the fondly-remembered Baf's Guide) who will be helping me demo Seltani that weekend.

There's also an IF meetup on Saturday night at the IndieCade Night Games festival. I'll be attending that too.

The WordPlay festival of narrative games and IF is back in Toronto on Nov 7th. I'll be there, along with other stalwarts of the IF scene including Emily Short, Sam Barlow, Christine Love, and (our blog-host) Jason McIntosh.

(Is "stalwarts" an okay thing to call people? I don't always know.)

Let me also mention the Boston IF meetups (at MIT) on Oct 12 and Nov 11. Emily Short will be visiting for the November meeting.

Seltani at IndieCade 2015

A very quick note to say that Seltani has been selected as an IndieCade festival nominee!

(Among many other recent indie wave-makers such as Her Story, Kerbal Space Program, Plug & Play, and Prune.)

This means I will be in Los Angeles for the IndieCade festival. (October 23 to 25.) I will be showing off Seltani. Showing off a MUD in the middle of a modern games festival! I don't even know what that means!

(Well, I've demoed Seltani in public before, so I have an idea what it means. But never on this scale.)

I am proud, humbled, and not a little freaked out. Further details to follow.

Videogames in the Hugo Awards

This post is not about nomination slates.

The recent excitement around the Hugos has led to record-breaking levels of public discussion and voting. That's good! It's also led to an early start to the "what's worth nominating next year?" discussions. Also good (and I've noted down some recommendations for my own to-read list). But that's not what this post is about either. This is a game blog, so we're going to talk about the possibility of a "Best Videogame" category for the Hugos.

To catch up: the Hugo Awards are the annual awards for best science fiction and fantasy of the year. They originated in 1953. There are a bunch of categories, including Novel, Short Story, Short Dramatic Presentation (TV episodes), and Long Dramatic Presentation (movies). But the categories have shifted over time; for example, a Graphic Story (comics) category was added in 2009.

So how about a videogame Hugo category? Many games are science fiction and fantasy. (I could argue that most videogames have at least some SF or fantasy elements.) (I could also argue that "sci-fi videogames" do not form a genre the way sci-fi books or movies do, but I won't get into that argument here.)

Looking back in history, I find that an "Interactive Video Game" category was experimentally added in 2006. It received very few nominations and the category was dropped before the final round.

But, I venture to say, times have changed and fandom has (slowly, cane-wavingly) changed too. Comics are in -- probably because lots more fans read comics. (I suspect this is because of web-comics.) Are games as widely appreciated by SF fandom? I'm sure they are, because the field of gaming has become so variegated and spread to so many audiences. Not everybody is playing Metal Gear Solid this week -- I'm not -- but an awful lot of people have played a casual web-game or an online board-game or some form of IF or an indie Steam game or, or, or... something.

So I'm willing to say it's time.

Mysterium news roundup, 2015

Been a while since I cranked this machinery, hasn't it?

Mysterium was in Boston this year. It was fun! There isn't a whole lot of news out of Myst fandom, but I can point at a few things.

Obduction development continues. Cyan had a special preview trailer for fans attending the convention. Looked great, albeit very still-in-production. Yes, they want to release a trailer for everybody to watch, once they've got things more polished. ("Later this summer".) The game itself is running "a little late" and doesn't have a ship date yet.

There is no news on the Myst TV show front. (We recall that back in May, Hulu expressed interest pending script approval. Nothing has been announced since.) Rand Miller offered a lot of optimism but no details.

(For a liveblog of the Q&A session with Rand and the Cyan staff, see this Tumblr post.)

Starry Expanse development also continues. (This is the fan-made Riven-in-3D project.) You can watch the team's presentation and demo of Age 233 (Gehn's office). Or look at screenshots.

The convention built a "room escape" game in one of the hotel rooms! This was a fantastic construction, with journals and audio recordings and motion detectors and Arduino-controlled consoles. Cyan even contributed some audio of Atrus (Rand Miller) speaking. And... the game didn't really work. This is a darn shame. There were hardware bugs, software bugs, puzzle solvability issues. Several teams attempted the game; none solved it.

For a detailed post-mortem, see this Tumblr post. (With video tour!)

Disclosure: I was invited to help out with the puzzle design. Further disclosure: I got too busy and flaked out. Sorry! I contributed some ideas to the original brainstorming session, and I commented a bit during the design process, but that's all. Major props to Tonbury for the puzzle design, Taniith for heroic construction work, and Riv for a light-up linking book (the way out, which nobody reached). I wish we had had four more weeks for playtesting and polish.

And finally... well, not finally but pretty late on Saturday... I was on a panel about narrative games. I was joined by Ichiro Lambe (Dejobaan Games) and Dean O'Donnell (professor at WPI). This was a hoot, although somewhat unstructured; we bounced around topics and generally attempted to sound smart. Do we have video? Er... not yet. (Everything went out over Twitch but it hasn't all been wrapped up for Youtube yet.) I will update this post when that's available.

That is the news. (Or lack thereof.) Next year, hopefully, much more concrete information on Obduction and the TV show.

Followup on Steam Machines

A few months ago I posted "I am a person who will buy a Steam Machine". This month Valve put up a pre-order page, allowing us to pre-order the controller, the streamy widget, and the first two SteamOS boxes (from Alienware and Syber).

It would be narratively satisfying to title this post "I am a person who has bought a Steam Machine!" Sadly, it's not true. Yet! I will -- I figure I'll order in time for the headline launch date of early November. Pre-ordering might get me a console by mid-October, but am I that excited? Not really. Also, I have a whole lot of work to do this summer and fall.

(I'll have a whole lot of work to do this fall and winter, too. But I will at least have been paid for the summer work!)

The Steam Machine hasn't gotten a lot of good press -- not in comparison to the rapturous E3-load of promises from Sony and Microsoft. A quick news scan turns up headlines like "Don't buy a Steam Machine" (The Verge) and "Microsoft is building the Steam Machine Valve can't" (TechRadar). Well okay.

(On top of that, The Last Guardian really is shipping. Nothing Valve can do about that, obviously.)

I agree with the common criticism: Valve needs to push the "buy this and it works" console brand. Their pre-order web page touts customizability, not simplicity, and then it launches me into a pair of OEM product pages. (I credit Syber for showing me a clean good/better/best sales page, although they then ruin it with pop-up alphanumeric spew. Alienware's page is a mess; four models at the bottom of the page, just above the Beats headphones. Not even ordered by price.)

Just point me at a machine and explain why it's great. Marketing, people!

So. I'll still give it a shot. Valve and its partners are, unsurprisingly, bullish on the coming SteamOS game lineup. (See this quote from Alienware.) That's half the target they need to hit. The other half is to avoid a swamp of hardware-configuration noise which is indistinguishable from PC-land.

Customizing an interpreter for a Glulx game release

Another technical question from Twitter: the integration of Hadean Lands with its iOS app. How did I set up iOS UI features like the dynamic map and the recipe index?

(Warning: if you don't think C code is interesting, this post is not for you! Sorry.)

The iOS version of HL uses my standard iOS IF interface, extended. I've added two tabs to it. The map tab shows your current location, and you can tap to travel to any room you've visited before. The recipe tab shows an index of recipes and other information you've learned. These work just like the "GO TO..." and "RECALL..." commands, so they don't make the game easier to solve, but they're convenient shortcuts.

I'm not going to post the iOS UI code I used. If you know iOS programming, it's very basic -- textbook UITableView and UIImageView stuff. Instead, I'll talk about the general problem: transferring information between the Glulx VM and your native (C) interpreter.

I should put "general problem" in quotes. There are several Glulx interpreters, after all. But let's assume that you're building a native app for your Glulx game, incorporating the glulxe interpreter engine (in C), and you want to customize it with game-specific features. You've implemented the UI part; now you just need to extract game state information. Say, the player's location to show on the map.

Hadean Lands greenlit! It turns out

A few days ago my idle twitter-browsing was upended:

Huh. I just checked the Greenlight page for @zarfeblong's Hadean Lands... I somehow missed the news that Valve had started the GL process (@andetkaihetera)

Really? I, um, missed the news too. But a quick glance at the HL Greenlight page showed:

This game has been Greenlit by the Community!

The community has shown their interest in this game. Valve has reached out to this developer to start moving things toward release on Steam.

I was off at Balticon, so I couldn't dig into the matter right then. (Which is why everybody else announced the news before me.) But now I'm back and more or less caught up on life. So here's what I know.

If Valve reached out to me, I missed it. The Greenlight page says "Updated: May 12 @ 7:24pm", and the voting stats stop on May 11. So I guess the game was officially greenlit two weeks ago and nobody noticed until this weekend? O the embarrassment.

The site now offers me a link to "become a Steamworks partner". So I have begun that process. I have filled out a great many forms' worth of tax and banking info, the usual excitement. (And the usual confusion about whether I should use Zarfhome LLC's EIN or my personal SSN, a question which I will never, ever get right on the first try.)

Bureaucracy aside, what does this mean for Hadean Lands? I wish I could just push a button and launch the thing onto Steam. But no -- not that simple.

Javascript wonkery

Here I will take a break from the ever-burbling stream of IF and Myst news, and talk about Javascript optimization.

You could say it's relevant because it came up in a Quixe bug report. ("I tried loading Emily Short's Counterfeit Monkey.... Load time dropped from 29.4 seconds to 10.4 seconds...") IF interpreter improvements are a high priority for me -- particularly if they could be big speed improvements for a fairly small code change. Double-particularly if they imply I've had crappy Javascript code out there for years.

Whoops.

Myst TV series acquired by Hulu

We noted last fall that Cyan had started developing a Myst TV series with Legendary Television. Yesterday this jumped forwards a notch:

• Hulu Lands 'Myst' Drama From Legendary TV (Deadline)
• After decades of efforts, Myst TV live-action show to debut on Hulu (VentureBeat)
• (confirmed by Cyan's Twitter account, with a cute photo of the Cyan and Hulu people yanking the big Riven lever)

The show is not yet greenlit. The deal seems to be that Hulu looks over the script, and if they like it, they'll start production on a season of TV (not just a pilot episode). The script is by Evan Daugherty, who is best known for the screenplays of Divergent and Snow White and the Huntsman.

(I've said snarky things about SWatH, but it was memorable and visually striking, at least...)

The producer will be Matt Tolmach; executive producers will include Larry Shapiro as well as Cyan's Rand Miller and Blake Lewin.

We still don't know anything about the script itself. The Deadline article says "It will explore the origins of the island of Myst from the game where a man wakes up on a mystery island..." But it's not clear if that represents any sourced information or if the journalist is just googling.

As a footnote: don't read the comments. I was half-amused, half-disgusted to find that there's a television equivalent of the "what about Android?" guy. It's the "what about Netflix?" guy. Since these articles are about games and TV, both species show up.

Hadean Lands on the Humble Store

I am happy to announce that Hadean Lands can now be purchased directly from the Humble Store. (It's currently listed under New Releases, though of course it will scroll off that page pretty soon.)

This is the same version that's been available all along. (No, I have not done a bug-fix release. I know, it's getting to be time...)

The Humble Store is fixed-price, not pay-what-you-want. The win is that 10% of proceeds go to charity.

You can still buy HL through the pay-what-you-want widgets on my web site. It's still in the Adventure Gamers Store. And of course the iOS version is still available from Apple.

(Have you voted for Hadean Lands on Steam Greenlight?)

XYZZY Awards

The XYZZY Awards for best interactive fiction of 2014 have just been announced. I'm happy to say that Hadean Lands won in four categories: Best Puzzles, Best Setting, Best Implementation, and Best Use of Innovation.

The overall Best IF Game of 2014 went to 80 Days, which absolutely deserved it. It was a tightly-contested award -- Hadean Lands was in the running, along with Kevin Gold's Choice of Robots, Porpentine's standout Twine work With Those We Love Alive, and IFComp winner Hunger Daemon by Sean M. Shore.

Winners in other categories included Lynnea Glasser's Creatures Such As We, Ade McT's Fifteen Minutes, michael lutz's the uncle who works for nintendo, and a symbolically satisfying tie between Twine and Inform 7 for Best Technological Development.

Here's the full list of winners and finalists. Congrats to everybody!

Since this is my brag post, I'll also note that I'm working on a new IF game! This will not be parser-based. I've got ideas about cool things to do with a touchscreen other than typing a lot.

No other hints right now. Stay tuned for more information.

Various world models in IF

Another question from the tweetzone: "What are the significant differences for object/rooms + hypertext/choice vs parser + web?"

Here's (more of) that strand(s) of conversation:

I want tools to create a hypertext based game that still has a room and object model for the engine. Any suggestions? (@KalevTait)

I've done it (in Glulx) but the game design space is poorly understood. (As compared to parser+object model.) (@zarfeblong)

this just means it needs more research (@emshort)

What are the significant differences for object/rooms + hypertext/choice vs parser + web? Maybe I’ve misunderstood. (@jurieongames)

Emily's further responses:

parser + web = you still type. world model + choice = you're selecting what to do from options based on model (@emshort)

Oh, and I guess choice-based games tend to come from a CYOA, paragraph-based design approach? (@jurieongames)

often. even if they don't, enumerating all the options that would exist with a parser gives you a too-long list (@emshort)

so you need then to build a hierarchical interface or else have a smaller tighter verb set, for instance (@emshort)

I agree with Emily here (as usual), but I want to back up and talk about ways I've approach IF design.

Designing alchemy in a puzzle game

A question about Hadean Lands from the tweet gallery: "Have you written anything about how you approached designing the alchemical system?"

Excellent question! The answer is "No, but I should, shouldn't I," yes okay. (Thanks @logodaedalus.)

My twitter-sized reply was "Sound cool while supporting the puzzles," but I can say more than that.

(Note: I will start this post by talking about HL in generalities. Later on I'll get into more spoilery detail about the game structure. It won't come down to specific puzzle solutions, but I'll put in a spoiler warning anyway.)

Why it takes longer than you think

In case you're wondering, nobody hassled me about how long the rewards took. Apparently you folks really were in it for the game -- or to support me, which is even nicer.

However, I bet there are people out there who are working on Kickstarters. And they should be warned: it always takes longer than you think. To substantiate this, here's a timeline of Hadean Lands work that came after the game shipped.

Note that I did lot of reward design in December, but didn't order the stuff until early January. That's because I knew I would be out of town for the last week of December. I didn't want expensive parcels arriving when I was gone.

I am a person who will buy a Steam Machine

Yesterday Valve lit up their Steam Machine store page, offering previews of the upcoming Steam-based gaming consoles. (All "available November 2015".) It's a somewhat preposterous range of hardware -- sub-$500 boxes up to $5000.

I am not and never have been a connoisseur of graphic-card model numbers. ("More digits is better, right?") Come November, I'm going to have to browse a lot of tech-rag web pages to figure out which way is up.

I did a little of that browsing today. Naturally it's all handwaving at this point, and this post will only throw more hands in the air. But here are the first two articles I found:

• Steam Machines Are Back (Sean Buckley, Gizmodo)
• The PS4 and Xbox One Have Nothing To Fear From $500-$5,000 Steam Machines (Paul Tassi, Forbes)

You can read the articles if you want, but the headlines sum it up. Either the Steam Machine is a rising force in the console market, or it's a laughable dead end. Journalism!

I can't speak to the market appeal of these things. But I was excited by the original Steam Machine announcement of 2013, and I still expect to buy one this fall. Why? Many factors converging.

The Adventure Gamers Store is open

The season of GDC-and-PAX is upon us, which means more gaming news than any one human can hope to digest. And yet, I will burden you with a couple more snippets.

The AdventureGamers.com site, which has been reviewing adventures in various forms since 1998, has opened a web storefront specifically for adventure games. Hadean Lands is in the launch lineup, as are several other indie highlights: Dominique Pamplemousse, Lumino City, stacks of Wadjet Eye and Daedalic titles, etc.

(AdventureGamers.com gave Hadean Lands a super-nice review back when I launched.)

Note the Adventure Gamers Store currently only offers Windows versions of these games. (They say they hope to add Mac/Linux in the future.) Also, everything is currently priced in Euros. (You can buy from the US or anywhere else, don't worry.) I've set the HL price at €4.39, which makes it a fractionally better deal than the $4.99 price I've got everywhere else. Snap it up before the winds of currency conversion shift!

And in other news about places that sell HL...

The Itch.IO site has just announced that they will start taking a share of game revenues. (For most of their history they have been a completely free service.) This change will happen on March 23rd.

Unlike most platforms, they are going to let the game author decide what cut Itch takes of their games. They suggest 10%, but the author can move that slider anywhere between 0% (author keeps all the loot) up to 100% (donating all revenue to support Itch).

This is a sweet idea, and very much in the spirit of the Itch service. I am happy to support it by offering them the same 30% taken by Apple, Steam, and (for that matter) the Adventure Game Store. You can buy HL via Itch here.

Mazes from the depths of time

Occasionally someone asks me about porting System's Twilight to a modern platform, because setting up a Mac emulator is a pain. I figure that someday the Internet Archive's Software Library will have it, and I'll just point there.

(In fact JSMESS already supports early Macs, but I don't know how to set it up for a single game on my web site.) (No, this is not a task I intend to tackle right now.)

Anyhow, I started checking the status of the Software Library last night, and got distracted looking through the Apple 2 section. I played a little of this and that -- games I remembered from my childhood -- and then my attention was snagged:

Penqueriel Mazes (19xx)(Sadistic)



Yes, that's me.

Trinity: design ruminations

This is not a detailed review of Infocom's Trinity, because Jimmy Maher has just finished that job. His sequence of posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) puts the game into its context in Infocom's history and, more broadly, in the history of the Atomic Age (remember that?) and the Cold War. Go read.

Inevitably Maher comes around to the question of the ending -- the "...what just happened?" denouement. (You can read just that one post if you're familiar with the game.) It's not the first time, of course. Maher links to a Usenet thread in which we went 'round this topic in 2001.

It's generally agreed that the plot logic of the ending doesn't really hold together. In fact, my teenage self was moved to write a letter of complaint to Infocom! I received a gracious response -- I think it was written by Moriarty himself -- which basically said "The game ends the way we felt it had to end." Which is unarguable. (This letter is in my father's basement somewhere, and one day I will dig it out and scan it with great glee.)

But today I am moved to be argumentative. If I were the author of Trinity, what would I have done?

(Oh, sure, I'm being presumptuous too. All due apologies to Moriarty. But we're both thirty years older; we're different people than the author and player circa 1986. It's worth a rethink.)

(I will assume that you've played the game and read Maher's post. If not, massive spoilers ahoy.)

Sweet formatting for Inform 7 source code

One of my limited, high-level Kickstarter rewards was "The Hadean Lands source code, in book form". I had these printed in January, I mailed them out last week, and some of my backers have already received them. They're a hit!

@zarfeblong Hadean Lands source book looks fantastic. If I7 source is readable in book form, this is about as good as I'd expect it to look. (-- @dan_sanderson)

My Hadean Lands Source Codex book arrived. Wow - really nicely done. I'm in love with this strange artifact. Thanks @zarfeblong! (-- @telehack)

@zarfeblong Book received, really nice! What service did you use? Did I7 output source that nice-looking or did you post-process a lot? (-- @dan_schmidt)

That last is an excellent question. Everybody deserves nicely-printed source code, so here's how I did it.

(Spoiler: here's my Python script.)

Forward planning for IF tools

I've been bemoaning the slightly run-down state of IF interpreter software. (The confusing font preference system in Gargoyle is just one example.) The fact is that the big surge of open-source IF activity was the late 90s and early 00s. Since then, coders have been drifting out of the community, and the ones still around have gotten lazy. (I include myself in that indictment, for damn sure.)

As a community, we do not have a tradition of mentoring and fostering new contributors to IF projects. All of our projects were made by people (most often solo developers) who got excited and wrote a whole application or library.

I like to think that we've got a good software stack, which smooths the path a little. You can write an Inform extension or a Glk library port or a Glulx engine core or a Parchment web service, and it will fit into the ecosystem. But it still starts with a person showing up with enough energy to start, build, and finish an idea. If someone shows up who is curious but not committed, we nod companionably and wait to see what happens. The results, over time, are predictable: activity slows down and stops.

With that introduction, you'd expect me to go on and talk about mentoring. But I don't know anything about mentoring. I'm one of the control freaks! I'd rather work on my own projects than collaborate.

Anybody want to think about community-building? (Hopeful look around...)

(Of course a lot of my projects are specifications and tools that interoperate with other people's code. So I kick myself in the ass and make it happen. But my natural talents do not lie in management.)

In this post, I'm going to talk about my plans as a solo IF tool developer. Warning: I will also talk about money.

Hadean news of the week

I thought this was the boring part of the release process. Hadean Lands has been out for a couple of months, I've done a couple of iOS updates, time to settle down and work through the Kickstarter rewards. Plan for more distribution platforms, like Steam and the Humble Store. Boring stuff.

Wrong! It's crazy excitement time.

First thing this week, two fantastic reviews appeared:

"The best video game I played last year is a science-fiction thriller about alchemy, and it has no graphics or sound effects." -- David Auerbach, Slate

"Hadean Lands is an endlessly clever experience." -- Sean Clancy, Pocket Tactics

Suddenly the sales rate is going nuts, Twitter activity is buzzing, and my head is spinning.

When a wave of publicity hits, that's when you want a Steam Greenlight page, right? (Greenlight is the voting system that Steam uses to gauge public interest in new indie games.) So I have spent the past day constructing one. Here it is:

Vote for Hadean Lands on Steam Greenlight!

This isn't a purchase; it just indicates to Steam that this is the kind of game you want them to offer. When enough "yes" votes accumulate, I get a slot on the Steam storefront. (No, I don't know how many votes is enough.)

(Speaking of Greenlight, I note that two other parser IF games went up this month: Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter (Mike Gentry and David Cornelson) and The Shadow in the Cathedral (Ian Finley and Jon Ingold). There's also Her Story, which is not a text game, but is by IF author Sam Barlow. And that must only scratch the surface; I haven't even tried to survey the Greenlight world.)

IF at Arisia

Arisia, one of Boston's many sci-fi conventions, is coming up this weekend. I won't be there (I'm at Mystery Hunt) but several Boston IF people will be, and there are a whole slew of IF-related panels and events.

First, there will be another Lost Pig performance (with audience participation) on Friday evening, 7:00 pm, Grand Ballroom B. Hosted by Brad Smith, with live performances and foley.

Panels of IF relevance... (Note: I'm pulling these from the Arisia schedule, which is subject to change. Also, these are just the panels I see which strike me as relevant and/or which include IF people I know. There's a whole Gaming program track which you could go to.)

Games and Minority Representation (Friday 10:00 pm, Alcott): Heather Albano, Bob Chipman, Caelyn Sandel (m), Pablo Miguel Alberto Vazquez III

Gender and Gaming (Saturday 10:00 am, Griffin): Chris Denmead, Brian Liberge, Meghan McGinley (m), Maddy Myers, Caelyn Sandel, Brianna Wu

DIY Digital: Homemade Video Games (Saturday 4:00 pm, Faneuil): Adri, Heather Albano, Caelyn Sandel (m), Carolyn VanEseltine

The Internet Hate Train: Moving Past Gamergate (Saturday 5:30 pm, Faneuil): Adri, Bob Chipman, Maddy Myers (m), Caelyn Sandel, Alan Wexelblat, Brianna Wu

Games as Interactive Literature (Sunday 4:00 pm, Adams): Adri, Meghan McGinley, Joshua A.C. Newman, Rebecca Slitt, Alan Wexelblat (m)

Video Games as Art (Sunday 5:30 pm, Adams): Bob Chipman, Israel Peskowitz (m), Caelyn Sandel, Carolyn VanEseltine

Go, enjoy, stay hydrated.

Trope Tank Writer in Residence, Spring 2015

I am proud to announce that I am the first Writer In Residence at the Trope Tank for the coming semester.

What is the Trope Tank, you ask? That's Nick Montfort's office at MIT, home of his enormous collection of classic videogame hardware, software, and literature. (You can see just one corner of it behind me in the photo.) (Although I think the Asteroids cabinet is out of order again.)

What does it mean that I am a Writer In Residence? Well, basically it means that I have a key, and I will be hanging out in the office once a week. Wednesdays, I expect. I will certainly be working on some kind of IF project there; possibly Glulx upgrade work or interpreter hacking. And, generally, I'll help keep the lights on -- Nick is on leave for the spring semester.

The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction will continue to hold monthly meetings in the Trope Tank. Possibly we will schedule other events there, such as IF writing circles. Details remain to be determined. Join the PRIF mailing list if you're interested.

Thank you, Nick. I look forward to the coming semester.