Zarf Updates

Since my Kickstarter project is done -- not done done, I still have postcards and so on, but done enough for soup -- I should write the "support this other Kickstarter!" post.

I've already talked about Elegy for Dead World, which came to a triumphant conclusion a couple weeks back, and Extrasolar, which sadly did not. But there are lots of crowdfunders still open this season. Kickstarters, Patreons, Indiegogos... Indiegogoes? Indiegogols? Anyway, here are a bunch which at least brush up against the interactive fiction world.


Ice Bound: A mixed-media game-and-book project by Aaron Reed. Aaron's earlier project 18 Cadence let you explore a house's history by rearranging and constructing texts. This one looks to be in the same vein, but more so. It was inspired, Aaron says, by House of Leaves as well as Borges, Nabokov, and Italo Calvino. The Kickstarter is already past its original goal and is now targetting an "open-source the engine" stretch goal. I am always in favor of game engines being open source. Four days left!

Haphead: A TV-on-the-web series: teenagers play videogames so immersive that they become actual badass ninjas. Produced by Jim Munroe, sometime IF author and indie filmmaker -- his last sci-fi effort was the movie Ghosts With Shit Jobs. They've got film in the can; they're collecting money for post-production and release. This has two weeks to go and hasn't yet hit 50% funding, so it needs some love.

Demon: You probably first met Jason Shiga through his CYOA-comic Meanwhile. (Possibly the iOS version that I helped create.) Now he is writing a (non-interactive) web-comic called Demon. Demon is a riff on the superhero genre which is both viciously bitter-dark and cheerfully nerdy-charming. I think it's great. You can read the comic for free, but Shiga is funding it through Patreon, so if you want to support him, that's how to do it.

Ready, Okay! and Photopia: Adam Cadre wrote a bunch of groundbreaking IF. You probably don't need me to tell you that. He is currently rewriting Ready, Okay! (his school-shooting comedy novel from 2000-ish). He is also writing a novel version of Photopia (one of the IF games that I don't need to tell you about because everybody in IF knows it). He's got an Indiegogo project to support these efforts. It's labelled "$500 flexible funding", but that's misleading. It's open-ended. The idea is that however much money he makes will go towards full-time writing, as opposed to between-the-cracks-of-the-day-job writing. Or you can support his regular blogging-and-reviews writing through Patreon.

I Hate Zombies: Kevin Wilson has designed a teeny little card game for BoardGameGeek, and they're trying to get it printed. Kevin has been part of the IF community forever -- he ran the very first IFComp in 1995. The game isn't IF-related, though, it's about zombies. "Rock-Paper-Scissors. To the Death!" Just launched, doing nicely.