Zarf Updates

IGF finalists were announced yesterday. I don't have a pile of reviews queued up for this year, but I can at least post my quick comments.

I beta-tested, so take this as a promo rather than a full review.

Roottrees! They're back! And more hand-drawn than ever!

If you haven't played The Roottrees Are Dead, now's the time to jump in. One of the top static deduction games to follow in the Obra Dinn's wake. Like I said about original free version of Roottrees:

The Roottrees are a five-generation dynasty of candy magnates from western Pennsylvania. Or rather, they were, because the most famous scions of that line just died in a plane crash. You're handed a blank family tree and ordered to fill in the names, faces, and professions of every blood descendant of old Elias Roottree. It's 1998 and you have a state-of-the-art terrible web browser. Get searching.

Now the UI is spruced up, it's got a contextual "ask the rubber duck" hint system, there's more voice acting, and the AI-generated art is gone. The plaid shirt is really plaid now. You have a search history to review your findings; that was my dearest wish from playing the old version.

If you have played Roottrees, now's the time to play it again. It's still a fun puzzle. Really, I found it nearly as much of a challenge the second time around. I'd forgotten a lot of the critical details since last April.

But also, once you complete the original game, a whole new chapter unlocks: Roottreemania! You've found the known descendants -- now hunt for rest!

(You know, the ones born on the wrong side of the sheets. Love-Roottrees. Roottrees bar sinister. Some Roottrees slept around, is what I'm saying.)

The new chapter is as big again as the original. The final sealed-envelope challenge is deeper and asks more deductive twists of you. But like the original, you can't get very stuck on it. Figure out as much as you can, use as many hints as you like, and then hit the "wrap it up" button. You'll get a satisfying story ending even if you haven't figured out every detail.

Did I say recommended? Recommended.

Here's a little something I've been working on: The Visible Zorker!

Really, go give it a shot. It's a toy. You can read the rest of this post later.

...Okay, a quick introduction. The left pane is regular old Parchment, the Z-code interpreter, playing Zork 1. You type commands; the game responds.

Just regular old Parchment? Not quite! This is Parchment exposed. The upper right pane shows the stack trace for the current turn. That's all the ZIL functions called, and all the text printed, when executing the most recent command.

And the bottom right pane shows the ZIL source code -- the original text, written by Infocom folks in the 1980s. Click on any function or printed string; it'll show you that code in context.

Now check out the other tabs!

The "World" tab shows the game world as nested objects. The "State" tab shows ZIL global variables. "Timers" is the table of timers and daemons -- functions called every turn or counting down to a future call.

All of these displays update live, every turn, as you play the game. You can click on any line to see the ZIL source that implements it.

And those green buttons? Those display my comments on the source. ZIL isn't the easiest language to read (it's a Lisp derivative), so I wrote up some helpful footnotes.

Really, go play with it. Run around. See how Zork works. Haven't you always wondered?

(I mean it about the spoilers, though.)

Now that we're past the holidays, here's your reminder that NarraScope is accepting talk proposals. (It's been open for a few weeks, but you know, holidays.) The deadline is February 7th.

This year we also have a track for academic papers. We're trying to do more with Drexel, our host university this year, so this is a bit of crossover. The paper submission form isn't open yet, so keep an eye on that if you're of the academic persuasion.

Oh, there's also a brand-new NarraScope account on Bluesky. So brand-new that we haven't said anything yet, but that will change soon... And all the other contact lines are still open, of course.

See you in June in Philadelphia, I very much hope.

Welcome to my last blog post of 2024. Unless something really exciting happens this afternoon. I suspect not; I'm not doing anything except making cookies.

This happens to be my fiftieth blog post of 2024, which beats my previous record of 48 in 2008. There's nothing particularly interesting about this record. In fact I started this post to just say "Ha! Fifty blog posts in 2024! Merry new year!" But I guess it's turned into a 2024-in-review sort of thing.

I'll keep it snappy:

• Four months of employment, and no, that wasn't a contract gig. It was a flameout. The smoking remains of that company are now being picked over by a lawsuit, I hear. (No, I'm not involved.)
• Attended four conferences (GDC, Scintillation, NarraScope, XOXO). NarraScope was a great success; we're on for Philadelphia in 2025.
• Stepped down as an IFTF board member; handed over NarraScope to new chairs; began the process of stepping down as IFTF treasurer.
• Finished several code projects, including a photo catalog, a Blorb editor, autotranscripting for Lectrote. Plus I turned off MacOS spellcheck for good.
• 16 game review posts covering 46 games.
• Shipped three games: The Beyond (Steam), Leviathan (iOS), and Advent Window (a jam game but it counts!)
• Bought 80 books (only 33 were physical volumes). Looks like T. Kingfisher is my top author of the year.
• Spent two weeks in Italy with my family. (Photo catalog link!)
• Started using Bluesky.
• Still have not gotten COVID. That I can tell.

And other stuff I didn't blog about, of course. Some good some bad. The usual. A life, if you can keep it.

And 2025? Look, we know the shitshow is laid in. I'm not looking forward to the details. Just gotta manage however we manage.

Onward to the cookies for New Year's. Melomakarona with spiced honey. Not a Jewish recipe or the Jewish calendar, but have something sweet for the new year anyhow.

My game Advent Window is today's entry in the Counfounding Calendar Advent calendar!

Yes, it's a followup to Advent Door and Advent Mirror. The games form a tiny trilogy. But you don't have to play the other two to solve this one.

Like its predecessors, Advent Window is a snack-sized IF puzzle written in Inform 7.

I really enjoyed the Counfounding Calendar this year, by the way. I solved quite a few of the puzzles (not all, ha ha no). Some standouts: Sunset Swim (Jack Kutilek); X Passage (MikanHako); Bring Your Pet To School Day (G.C. Katz); Purrradox (SevanSevan); Stick Stack (Notan).

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.