vivdunstan

Taking stock of my latest parser interactive game writing progress. Much to do, but encouraged can finish in time for IFComp 2026. And can see a way forward in the short term. Happy to share that it's episodic, and historical, but otherwise spoilery details redacted in the attached progress summary!



Thinking about what needs to be tackled/finished, I'm thinking I'll code the rest in order of chapters 2, 5, 6, 4, 1, 3 and 7. The first three are ones I'm currently most excited to tackle. Coding 4 from the existing plot design should be fairly mechanical. And finishing 1, 3 and 7 ought to be be easy.

Of course "ought to be easy" is a very risky thing to say when it comes to writing and coding up computer games, including interactive fiction! But I also know they're the sections that need the least amount of work still done on them. And almost certainly best tackled late in the day.

Had a very disturbed night neurologically last night, but on plus spent some very useful time building up some overview boards in Milanote of my next IF game (interactive fiction, in this case parser text adventure). Here's a snippet, hopefully blurred out enough in appropriate places! This is a board showing the 7 chapters side by side, with overview info of each, helping me balance things, as well as links to more detailed boards for each individual chapter. To be honest this is all rather advanced procrastination, when I really just need to get on with writing and coding up more game sections! But it is helping me see the balance, and through structure, and also helping highlight areas where I need to develop things more deeply or in differently connected ways. Milanote has a rather costly subscription model after you've used up the free allowance. But I'm currently finding it useful for brainstorming and developing. It's like having nested digital white boards. And syncs well across web, Mac, iOS and Android. I previously created mood boards in Milanote for both Bad Beer (my previous game) and this new game. But this is my first go properly planning and overviewing with it.

Reminded of April 1 Source Code Amnesty Day for interactive fiction games, I've just uploaded Inform source code for my IFComp 2024 entry Bad Beer. Source uploaded to IFArchive, and will take some days to process. Maybe ready by April 1st or soon after? Fab initiative.

Revising the interactive fiction section of my website, postponing my next IFComp game to 2026, not later this year. On plus I have a really good design worked out and it's well in progress. But it's bigger than I'd initially planned, and I want to give it enough time to develop sufficiently richly. Postponing the game entry to 2026 gives me lots of time to develop all of its chapters much more fully. And also to allow for at least a couple of rounds of thorough playtesting. I'm really excited by this new game design, and want to do it justice. Allowing more development time should really help!

Good bit of game design, planning out more of Chapter 4 of my latest parser interactive fiction / text adventure game. This time I was figuring out some plot structure in Twine, before coding in Inform 7. Figuring out obstacles, story beats etc. Have also been looking at ideas for Chapter 5. I'm designing/coding multiple bits at the same time. There will be 7 chapters overall. Quite a lot bigger than my previous game.

Especially pleased to manage this today because I've been too asleep all week to tackle it before. But finally got a good bit of game design work in! I was adding all the bottom half of this diagram today.

Trying a new to me oracle cards deck. Which is gorgeous. Even has shiny red gilt like edges to the cards! Just using for a bit more personal reflection. This deck is autumnal equinox themed.

Sticking with my usual 3-card past/present/future spread, in a really loose form.

The cards are Foraging / Mead and Wine / Autumn equinox.

I can also relate these roughly to where I've been / am / am going.

Re "Foraging" I've been spending the last few weeks gathering together thoughts on my personal strengths, interests and goals. All within the limited context in which I need to operate. Figuring out what I want to do in the coming 6 months or so has been productive, and rewarding, and should be able to translate into fun activities. Including things I can work on from my bed. So that's been a productive process.

As for "Mead and Wine", well we've had a lot of celebrations recently, which are ongoing! September is a double birthday month for us, and also marked our 30th wedding anniversary this year. We had to postpone our big celebration meal (takeaway, but still huge!) for erm reasons. So that is still upcoming. And this week we treated ourselves to a postal delivery of gorgeous brownies and cookies from Norfolk. Coming today ... We are going to be so plump by a week from now! But yes, that card is on point.

The autumnal equinox card might seem to have been more appropriate a couple of weeks ago, but it's not really. It's only now that I'm really feeling autumn kicking in properly. To be fair I can't get out much to see the gorgeous changing colours around. But it's in the last week or so that I've really felt the chill kicking in, and autumn is well and truly upon us. And will be for another couple of months. I do need to get out to enjoy some of it. Will add that as an urgent goal! I am also writing a new IF game set around the changing seasons, starting with autumn. So I need to soak up as much of it as possible. Thanks to the card for the reminder.

So an interesting deck. I will continue to use it from time to time. It is especially gorgeous to handle. There are others in the same range for different times of the year. But I like autumn, so picked this one for me.

Ordering me in some notebooks from Cult Pens. Strictly speaking I only currently needed one, for brainstorming ideas by hand for my next interactive fiction game. But they have such a nice range of good paper nice design ones that I thought I'd pick up another couple of notebooks too! These ones are Clairefontaine, stapled A5 size, 120 lined pages inside*, and 90gsm. So they will work well with my fountain pens. I am also brainstorming on the computer. But I often like to settle down with a notepad and pen in hand, when pondering ideas.

* Checking some other sites they may have 96 lined pages, not 120. But either is fine. I will tell Cult Pens if they need to correct their product listing, when I have the notebooks in hand!

Brainstorming a new IF game and came up with 10 very rough ideas. One calls out to me the most strongly, but I may also include elements of another five. That should be enough for getting on with! Much to do, but excited. As with the last one I want to get the bulk of the design in place before coding. Many months of slowly musing over ideas to come.

Sending out my IFComp 2024 game for its final round of playtesting. Scary and exciting at the same time! Also tomorrow I will be officially registering to enter the competition.

I'm nearing the end of getting my latest competition interactive fiction game ("Bad Beer") ready for its final round of playtesting. At the moment it's 13,363 words of Inform natural language source code. It will get a little longer when I add more customised responses to standard commands (one of the last few things to do). But not much longer. It is going into IFComp 2024 in August.

By comparison my 2018 IFComp game "Border Reivers" is 18,926 words of code. Though much of that is in tables for conversational responses: 7,000+ words for those alone. My 2020 Spring Thing game "Napier's Cache" is 23,181 words of source code.

"Bad Beer" is a modest game in scope, but is still deeply implemented. At least it was manageable in the time I had!