Another click-to-play IF prototype

I enjoyed Erik Temple’s latest demo so much that I had to jump on the band-wagon: so here is a take on the click-to-focus, click-to-do model he’s come up with, built into the online version of Make It Good.

Choice: from analogue to digital and back again

Erik Temple, creator of many extensions for Inform 7 that do animations, sprites, and lots of shiny things, has a new demo up on his blog, this time demonstrating a text-game playable without typing.

It’s a really good piece of work and shows real potential for making text games accessible: teaching the syntax while letting people get on with the game. But it also highlights one of the text games major problems – there’s way too much choice.

Gamification @ Futurebook

I’ll be talking the Futurebook conference in London on the 5th of December as part of a panel on the topic of gamification, alongside Anna Rafferty, MD of Penguin Digital and Jess Brallier of Pearson US.

It’s been hard for me to pin down exactly what I want to say. The normal rules for talking about game design don’t really apply – the audience will be publishers, editors and writers, and I think a standard design talk about risk/reward and challenge/learning might send people to sleep.

House-sized stories for Kindle

A few weeks ago I posted up a nasty little perl script called the Kindliser, which turns a plain-text markup into ebook-ready HTML. Not such a big deal – it’s just a web-page with links – except that it also included support for tracking true/false values, which is impossible.

It does it by playing through every possible game the player might have, and writing them all out separately… which turned my first example game Flaws from a 40Kb sourcefile with 40 paragraphs of so and 4 true/false flags into a 600Kb HTML.

The other day I thought; I wonder how far I can push this thing?

Top 50 IF games – or 13, at least

Over on the int.fiction forum, Victor Gijsbers has started a thread asking for people’s list of the best IF games ever. It’s quite a fun trip down memory lane and makes me long for the days when text-games were an unexplored terrain rich with possibilities…

For those who are interested, here’s my list, also posted on the forum.

Challenge, and how to avoid it

I was discussing challenge in games with a friend at work today – specifically, what to do with the player that can’t overcome it.

Interactive Fiction has long battled with the problem of stuckness, and these days it’s rare to see a polished game released without hints, walkthroughs, or such an incredibly linear storyline that pretty much anything you do will work. But could we be doing better? Consoles games increasingly are trying to resolve this problem: is there anything to learn from the experiments being done in the console world?

The History of Poly-V, available on Kindle

I recently picked up a copy of Rich Horton’s 2011 SF anthology, and was really excited to see my story The History of Poly-V in the recommended list at the back.

But the story’s a little inconvenient to get hold of, so I’ve put together an ebook version for Kindle.

I’m calling it a “sci-fi single”. Title track on the A-side, and a slighter, previously unpublished B-side story to go with. There’s also a short set of “liner notes” that discuss a little of the inspiration and history of both stories.

If you’re interested, it’s live on Amazon now; just choose your flavour.

• Amazon UK
• Amazon US
• Amazon DE
• There are also some reviews