vivdunstan

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!

I'm aiming to enter a text adventure / interactive fiction game in this year's IFComp. Which is running a month earlier than usual. Games must be completed and ready for the competition by late August. For a parser text adventure game that will also have to include sufficient playtesting and bug fixing time.

I've been very ill the last few weeks, not least with Covid round 3, so everything is behind. But I've just - while about to drop off to sleep again! - had a brainstorm re the later part of the game, which I need to code next. I can see the way forward. So I'm going to try to concentrate on coding that in the coming month.

Today the Spring Thing festival of interactive fiction opened, with lots more new games to play. I have entered this competition in the past. It's a lovely annual event each year in the IF calendar. Normally I'd try to review as many entries as possible, and take part in judging. But I think this year I need to focus on completing my own game for IFComp. I am also time and energy challenged right now to review anything. But it's nice to know SpringThing continues.