Interactive Fiction (IF) (Videogames)

Articles

• 2016.10.05 - RPS - IF Only: IF Comp 2016

Games

• Ryan Veeder
  • "Veeder is consistently great. Often I don’t want to invest 5 sheets of notes, a few pages of graph paper, and a couple of weeks to an IF game. Veeder produces short, frictionless pieces that nonetheless are very compelling and consistently interesting. Taco Fiction is funny, desperate, insightful, utterly weird, tense, and thought-provoking, all in about 2 hours and 20 rooms. His works achieve zarf’s brevity and fluidity, but are more “effortlessly” evocative of milieu and emotional state than just about anything else." (Source)
  • Taco Fiction
    • I found out about this here.
    • I really enjoyed this one.
      • Good length. It ended just as I was starting to get tired of it.
      • Good mix of humor, tension / suspense (robbing, then the secret meeting), romance (with the ice cream shop owner).
      • There were some surprises.
        • Ex: You think you see a dead body, and it ends up being a duffle bag.
      • I occasionally got frustrated when it wasn't clear what to do next.
        • Trying to get past the guard at the secret meeting, even though I knew what sequence of steps were necessary.
        • Trying to find the key to the cashbox at the end. It wouldn't let me just take the cashbox and leave with it without getting the key (it would say something like, "Hey shouldn't you find the key?")

Tools

• Inform - a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language
  • Used by Ryan Veeder.

Creation process

• Ryan Veeder
  • 2016.08.10 - The Imitable Process of Ryan Veeder
    1. "I always draw the map first."
    2. Next I decide what details are in each room.
    3. Next I start building the world in Inform.