Zarf Updates

Yes, it's winter. We got a dusting of snow, which isn't definitive (ask me about the Halloween snowstorm of 2011). But I've decided that December 8th was "Nighthawk's Solstice":

Therefore, winter has started.

In recent years I've saved up my winter reviews for the January IGF dump. And indeed I played quite a few games for IGF first-round judging. (Including The Thaumaturge.)

However, I'm not on the narrative jury this year. (Don't worry, you'll be quite happy with my replacement...) So I'm okay with dropping my opinions for the games that are already released.

In fact I only played one of today's games during the IGF judging phase.

• Phoenix Springs
• Rise of the Golden Idol
• The Gap
• 49 Keys

The Thaumaturge is an adventure-RPG set in a slightly alternate 1905 Poland. The alteration is thaumaturges: people with a familiar spirit (a "Salutor") and an interesting mix of psychic powers.

(Disclosure: while The Thaumaturge is high-end for an indie production, it showed up in the IGF lists and I got a free review copy to play.)

The game starts in a remote farming village. "Oho," you might think, "this is a Witcher riff -- a lone monster-slayer stomping around the Polish countryside." Nope! Your talents are far better suited to sniffing around a crime scene (which the village obligingly provides). You can track someone's psychic imprint on physical objects, glean their motivations, and -- in extremis -- give their thoughts a nudge. Okay, extremis happens pretty often.

Farm life isn't your milieu anyhow. The prologue ends with a telegram at the train station. Your father is dead back home, and home you gotta go. (All great fantasy has trains!) Welcome to fin-de-siecle Warsaw, a stew of Polish aristocrats, Tsarist soldiers, gang leaders, rabbis, revolutionaries, journalists, whores, pączki vendors, and on and on. And other thaumaturges, to be sure. (Your father was one.) Not to mention your travel companion, Grigori Rasputin his own fire-eyed self.

I guess it's not "the" media any more, it's just media. Anyhow!

I recently guested on Topic Lords, Jim Stormdancer's podcast about topics. Along with Ben Wilson, I am featured in episode 266: "Voronoi Cookies". (My title drop, may I say.) A very random conversation, as is the podcast's brief.

Baking; leaving crosswords on the street; a year isn't 52.0 weeks; Leila Chatti; fidgeting in Zoom; Things of Science.

Less random: A Conversation with Andrew Plotkin on The Digital Antiquarian!

Jimmy Maher has been running through the early history of videogames in intensely-researched detail for, oh, let's not say how many years. Of course many of his early posts were about interactive fiction, but now he's up to the mid-1990s so Infocom is gone and graphical adventures are trailing off.

But guess what happened in the mid-1990s? IFComp! And then my years as a hot young IF auteur. That's what the article is about. Runs from my early encounter with Adventure to the present (NarraScope, etc).

And yes, this is the interview where I admit that I skipped Plundered Hearts on launch because it looked girly. (I played it when the LTOI collection came out.)

Enjoy.

We learned yesterday that we lost game designer Kory Heath.

I set up a Bluesky account at the beginning of September, just to see what the process was like. (Easy, turns out.) But I didn't give it a push until around October 23rd. That's when I pinned an intro and started following people.

My motivations, I admit, were mercenary. I was two weeks out from launching Leviathan and The Beyond, and I figured I needed swing all the social media oomph I could reach.

Well, the launch happened. (Went okay for small narrative games. Not going to pay the mortgage.) I'm still on Bluesky. It's been a sociologically interesting few weeks. I figured I'd write down my impressions.

Over on Bluesky, someone asked whether everybody's blog traffic has declined over the past few weeks. (Original message requires Bsky login so I won't link directly.)

This got me looking at my blog stats, which I normally never, ever do.

Short answer: I don't think so? But my blog is tiny and the data is noisy, so how would I even tell. Some of my posts get popular -- though never what you'd call "viral". Most don't.

But why not peek at the data? I have logs going back to June 2023, when I moved off of Blogger.com. Yes, it's navel-gazing. But now that I'm shifting some weight onto Bluesky, I might have some followers who haven't seen my older posts.

Several months ago I write about making a new little photo tagging app. It's called phogg (for, I guess, "photo bloggor") and I've been diligently using it ever since. I now have about 2150 photos stacked up on my home media server.

That's great, but does the world care? My home media server is firewalled. You can't see it.

But occasionally I want to show off my photo collection to somebody. I mean, not the whole collection -- there's a lot of chaff and random food photos and photos of the people in my life, and I don't share that stuff without permission. But a curated subset.

Surely this is easy, though? I already have a widget in there to generate as the catalog as a static web page. I just need to tag some photos as "public", and then write a script to upload the tagged set to my public web site.

"I just need to write a script" is a dangerous phrase. I got a rough draft up quite quickly, and then realized two things:

• Public photos need titles as well as tags. So I had to add a title-editing field to the phogg UI. (I could have gone full Tumblr, with hyper-descriptive tags, but I decided not to. I curate my tag set too.)

• A photo site needs an RSS feed. Obviously.

So that was a bit more work, but I did it, and look! Photos! Feed!

Enjoy! A couple of warnings though:

I expect to update this page in batches. I take photos. Every few days, I sync them off my phone to my home media server and tag them. Every few weeks, I'll curate the recent acquisitions, tag some "public", and push them to the web site.

Also, nothing about this system tracks when a photo was uploaded. The metadata only shows when the photo was taken. The good news is that when a new batch of photos appears, they'll have correct dates. The bad news is that if I add a batch of old photos, they won't show up in the RSS feed -- the feed only lists the most recent 48 photos.

Also, while I've titled every image, I'm afraid I haven't provided alt text. I apologize for this. Alt text is a different job and it's rather a lot more work. Maybe later.

And now, a few favorites from the collection. Click for full-size.

I posted all the links last week, but today is launch day so let's have 'em again! Playable right now.

The Beyond is now available for Mac, Windows, Linux, and Steam Deck!

Your death was a tragedy... your afterlife is a mystery. Unravel the secrets of death with the help of Xochitl, your guide. Can you find your way through the doors of the great library of the Beyond?

• The Beyond on Steam
• The Beyond on Itch.IO (launch sale link here!)
• The Beyond as a hardback book
• and for iPhone/iPad? Hopefully early next year...

The Beyond has been selected as an exhibitor in the AdventureX Steam Festival for 2024!

(Among august company, to be sure. I've played part or all of Lil' Guardsman, Murder on Space Station 52, Two Falls, Your House, and of course Highland Song. Not to neglect honorable mentions Slay the Princess, Observation, Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, OPUS Starsong, Monkey Island, and Talos Principle 2. All worth a look. And, again, those are just the ones I've tried. I'll be adding many more of the AdvX selections to my to-play pile.)

Leviathan is now available for iPhone and iPad! (As well as all the desktop platforms.)

A seaside village – and a monstrous threat. Explore as you choose, by day or by night. Can you unravel the secrets of history and defeat the Leviathan?

• Leviathan on the App Store (iPhone/iPad)
• Leviathan on Steam
• Leviathan on Itch.IO
• Leviathan as a hardback book

Whew. That's all for now. Happy launch day, and, you know, good luck with everything else this week.

I am delighted to announce that The Beyond will be launching on Steam and Itch on November 4th. (Supporting Mac/Win/Linux/SteamDeck.)

The Beyond is one of Jason Shiga's interactive comic books, #2 in the Adventuregame Comics series. It's an adventure beyond the boundaries of life, death, and the covers of a book. Romance! Pirates! Probably a giant squid lurking somewhere!

• The Beyond on Steam (coming soon!)
• The Beyond on Itch.IO (coming soon!)
• The Beyond as a hardback book

But that's not all! We will also be launching Leviathan for iPhone and iPad on the same day -- that's November 4th.

Leviathan is Adventuregame Comics #1 -- a story of truth, lies, and yes, a giant squid. It's been available on Steam and Itch for a while; now it's making its debut on the Apple App Store.

I don't have a direct link for you, because Apple doesn't believe in "coming soon" pages for its app store. Watch this post or the Zarfhome site for the store page as soon as Leviathan goes on sale.

• Leviathan on the iOS App Store (update: available!)
• Leviathan on Steam
• Leviathan on Itch.IO
• Leviathan as a hardback book

(Before you write me: Apple does believe in "prepurchase this game" pages. But I'm not a fan of pre-orders so I didn't set that up. Pay your money on the 4th and start playing Leviathan right then and there!)

Of course, Meanwhile has been available on all these platforms for years. You could call it AdventureGame Comics #0 if you wanted. Little Jimmy discovers a laboratory full of fantastical inventions: a time machine, a doomday machine, and a SQUID. What will happen next?

• Meanwhile on the iOS App Store
• Meanwhile on Steam
• Meanwhile on Itch.IO
• Meanwhile as a hardback book

A quick note: I realize that next week is a High-Stress Interval for Americans and, really, everybody else. I apologize for getting tangled up with that. I gotta launch sometime and that week is when the timing worked out. Maybe these games will serve as a Monday diversion? I don't know. I can't fix American politics (and I already voted by mail) but I can keep supporting narrative games. Do what you can. Vote if you're a voter.

Looking beyond this launch and, we devoutly hope, after some much-needed stress relief...

I will of course work to bring The Beyond to iPhone/iPad. I've got the artwork and the layout, so it's just a matter of importing them into my iOS framework. Hopefully that will be available early next year.

Then there's Samurai vs Ninja, Adventuregame Comics #3 -- already available in book form. We have not yet started on adapting this one, so I won't try to promise a release date. We'll make it happen, though.

Thanks for supporting Jason and me all these years!

You may recall that my term as an IFTF board member ended in March. I've now also stepped back as the chair of NarraScope; Matt Griffin and JD Calvelli will be running that show in 2025. (More news on that front soon!)

This leaves me with two big IFTF roles: Treasurer and IF Archive lead. I'm happy with the IF Archive job; I figure I'll hold onto that for a while. But it's getting to be time to hand off the Treasurer job. I've been doing that since, well, since day one.

In fact, I've been doing a lot of work for IFTF that's agglomerated under the "Treasurer" job. I'm the person who sets up servers, pays the bills, tracks donations, configures the email system, keeps most of the passwords for services like AWS... a whole litany of tasks where I've said "Yeah, I'll just do that real quick" because that was easier than delegating.

So we've decided that I should have two successors:

• Treasurer: Manage the bank account and Paypal account; track all expenses and donations; make sure the bills are paid.
• Tech Officer: Manage the core online services (web hosting, domain registrations, email); set up new services when needed; general sysadmin work.

Note that the Tech Officer does not have to administer IFTF's service sites: IntFiction.org, IFDB, IFWiki, IFComp.org, and so on. Each of those programs has a committee and admins to keep them running. The Tech Officer's job is to manage the cloud services we use (Linode, AWS, Github, etc) and make sure the committees have the resources they need.

Obviously these are high-trust positions! We will primarily be considering candidates whose names we know -- people have been active in the IF and IFTF community for a while. Yes, this is a clique-y thing to say, but it just doesn't make sense to bring in a total stranger and give them the keys to the bank account or the servers.

So it's a little weird for me to be posting this on social media. I know! But it's worth getting the word out, and after all, a lot of my followers are folks that I know.

To everybody else: you are awesome too! There's plenty of scope to drop into the IFTF forum or Discord and say "Hey, I'm new here, I'd like to help out, what can I do?" Just, you know, probably not Treasurer on day one.

Okay, awkward part over. Interested in one of these jobs? Check out our forum post! (Which I posted last week; apologies if you've seen it multiple times.)

The doc attached to that post has the info for applying. The post also has estimates of how much work each role takes. (Fuzzy estimates, because it varies quite a bit.)

Oh, and don't worry -- I will give my successors a good long ramp-up for the job(s). And then I'll stick around as advisor to explain any surprises. I don't expect you'll be completely settled in for a full year, since, you know, IFTF does a lot of things that happen exactly once a year.

Thanks for your interest!