Zarf Updates

Layoffs at a game studio aren't news any more, but I guess I'm on this beat. If nothing else, this blog has a longer searchable history of Cyan history than Cyan does.

Yesterday Cyan posted one of those all-too-familiar dark-mode press releases:

(Cyan people confirmed on Discord that this was discussed in advance within the company.)

If you'd looked at me in 2000, you would have said "Andrew Plotkin is a young author of award-winning interactive fiction. He has a long IF-writing career ahead of him." And I would have agreed! I might have had a notion of branching out -- my IF career had made almost zero money, so maybe I should take my experience into the game industry in other ways. But really I wasn't thinking along those lines. I had a tolerable day job; writing IF was a rewarding hobby.

But this picture of me as "prolific IF author" was already yellowing around the edges. Sure, I wrote lots of games in the 21st century. I did Dreamhold, which was big and deliberately retro, but after that I didn't really have an idea for a big game. I entered Delightful Wallpaper in the 2006 IFComp; but after that it felt weird to enter IFComp, even anonymously. (I entered again in 2011 but that was a collaborative project.) I wrote a few short games for jams and showcases.

It just felt like I was pushing myself. Looking for reasons to get myself off my ass and write a game. Because if I wasn't writing games, what kind of game writer was I?

I am delighted to pass the word that NarraScope 2025 has posted its schedule and its registration link. Come see us in Philadelphia on June 20-22!

We've also announced our keynote speakers -- yes, this year we have two of them:

Vision Keynote: Hidetaka “SWERY” Suehiro

Saturday’s keynote will be delivered by SWERY, the internationally-acclaimed designer of cult favorite Deadly Premonition, the surreal horror-adventure that earned a Guinness World Record for its polarizing reception.

Local Hero Keynote: Dain Saint

Sunday’s Local Hero keynote will be delivered by Dain Saint (he/they), a Philadelphia-based storyteller and artist who has produced games through Cipher Prime Studios, interactive theatre with Obvious Agency, and journalism with the Philadelphia Inquirer.

(I'm quoting from our announcement mailing list. The keynote news went out last night.)

And of course the schedule has, what is it, about 75 other speakers listed? We've scaled up the conference this year. More rooms, more talks, more kinds of talks -- there's going to be some papers from the academic side of things. So we're aiming to scale up attendance as well.

The usual Friday workshops will happen, although that schedule isn't set yet. We will also have an on-site NarraScope Showcase event on Friday afternoon. So if you can make it to Philadelphia, please consider making it a three-day weekend.

If you can't make it to Philadelphia, you can register to attend online. We're keenly aware of the current economic and political issues, particularly for people travelling from outside the US. Rest assured that our hybrid model is still in full swing. All Sat/Sun talks will be livestreamed.

(For those of you waiting for the 2024 talk videos: we are very grateful for your patience. Now that reg is open, Matt has promised to spend some time this week plowing through the video backlog.)

Earlybird registration prices run through April 11. There's also info for conference hotel rates, which have various cutoff dates and availability limits. So plan early.

As always, I look forward to seeing you at NarraScope. Since I'm not running the show this year, I'll even have time to sit in on the talks and chat with people. Excitement!

This morning, Cyan updated Myst (the 2020 release) to include the Age of Rime. This is a free update on Steam (Mac/Win) and Quest; the Xbox update is in progress.

Do I need to say more than that? Sure, why not. Context is life.

A few weeks ago someone quietly posted a link to Invisiclues.org, a new Infocom fan archive.

The site is dedicated to (1) archiving historical Infocom-related artifacts -- InvisiClues, of course, but also magazine articles, marketing material, packaging, artwork, literature, and the games themselves -- and (2) making the archives available in an enjoyable format.

-- About Invisiclues.org

The Net has a lot of Infocom fan archives (including my own, of course). And the Infocom Invisiclues themselves are well-preserved.

Where this new site excels, though, is its collection of articles about Infocom. These are gathered from contemporary game magazines (Softline, Computer Gaming World, ...), general computing magazines (Byte, Softalk, Compute!, ...), and mainstream sources (Time, NYT, ...). There were 250 articles when the Invisiclues site launched, and it's over 300 now.

This collection way, way outstrips our existing collection of Infocom articles at the IF Archive. I imagine that the material is mostly filtered from Archive.org. But it represents an intense curatorial effort, and I'm happy to see it show up. My congratulations and gratitude to the site maintainer.

(As to the "enjoyable" part, check out the working status line in the top right corner. Cute!)

I twooted about Type Help (William Rous), a new deduction-type game which is so full of awesome surprises that it's hard to review!

But, after mulling for a couple of days, I've come up with stuff to say after all. Lucky you!

You are handed an old laptop full of files concerning an old (1936) investigation. A houseful of people were found dead. What happened? You have audio recordings (or rather text transcripts of audio recordings) from the residents' last day. But most of the files are unlisted; you have to figure out the filenames to unlock them.

In October I wrote:

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.

Today the Board formally voted in Colette Zinna as IFTF Treasurer and Doug Valenta as IFTF Tech Officer. Both of them have been around IFTF for a while (and in person at NarraScope). They're cool. I've been getting them up to speed since December. Now they are, as it were, speedy.

So that's me done! As Treasurer and de-facto tech guy, that is. As I said, I'm still IF Archive chair; I expect to do that for the foreseeable future. And I'm helping with NarraScope. No doubt other tasks. But I've attended my last board-and-officers meeting.

Of course I'm still a resource for the new officers. There will be many more questions like "How does this thing work that you set up five years ago?" But that's just... helping out. We all do that, as we can.

Keep doing that, as you can.

Got a bunch of hey-have-you-seen-this about the "Ink Console", a prototype tablet which plays choice-based IF. There's also a crowdfunding preview page.

Yep, I sure have have seen that. On several different forums.

The response from the IF community has been a mix of "That looks like fun!" and "Um, more market research needed? Maybe?"

Two more, in a bit more depth this time.

I see that Stray Gods has a new DLC chapter. Definitely playing that next.

• Citizen Sleeper 2
• Caravan SandWitch

So I was thinking about a text game idea where paragraphs of text change between a handful of possibilities as you make choices. Sort of a cycling choices effect.

But maybe instead of just replacing one block of text with another, I could do something visually neat. Like cross-fading. Or, how about this, maybe all the words could rearrange from one text into another. Some of them would move, some would appear, some would disappear...

= The    |  = The
         |  + rough
         |  + beast
         |  + ,
         |  + its
= hour   |  = hour
- is     | 
= come   |  = come
         |  + round
= at     |  = at
= last   |  = last
- ,      | 
- but    | 
- not    | 
- the    | 
- beast  | 
= ...    |  = ...

Well, that's just a diff function, right? Sure, you have to do all the animation work on top of that, which means text-layout work for the before-and-after. But the underlying logic is diff on two lists of words. Old-fashioned stuff. Same logic you see every day in version control systems.

("A diff command appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX," says my man page. That would have been 1975, if I'm reading the right timeline.)

Hang on. How does diff work anyway?