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A new Vampire: The Masquerade game came out for Choice of Games, Out for Blood, which apparently has you playing as a non-vampire (at least to start). I bought it basically blind and have started playing through it and it seems promising. The real draw, though, is that this game's storyteller mode tells you when your personality stats change which is something that should be mandatory for every CoG game from here on out.
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Jul 29, 2021 21:53
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MuffiTuffiWuffi posted:A new Vampire: The Masquerade game came out for Choice of Games, Out for Blood, which apparently has you playing as a non-vampire (at least to start). I bought it basically blind and have started playing through it and it seems promising. It's interesting that this has been so consistently mentioned. Magics did it a few years back too, as an optional toggle.
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Jul 30, 2021 10:15
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Well, this one is interesting not only for the history lesson in itself but that someone would bother to recover a text adventure they made 40 years ago, fix it up, and put it online. It's called Arctic Adventure and it was made for the TRS-80 microcomputer. Give it a go (it works straight from the web browser) and try such awesome commands as "get coat", "wear coat", and "go out". 
Saoshyant fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Aug 30, 2021 |
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Aug 30, 2021 01:50
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Wrote an IF game in 3 days using Ink for a game jam. https://nickoctopus.itch.io/the-wall The game itself doesn't work perfectly (way too wordy, but I ran out of time to edit it down because my stupid idea of having 12 different endings took ages to check they all worked right, and just wanted to get it finished), but I didn't know how to use Ink before I started so can safely say that Ink is pretty easy to pick up fast if anyone's looking for something to try using for their own projects. I missed the flow diagram you get with Twine, but it looked like you'd be able to some fairly complex choice-based stuff with Ink a bit easier than you would in Twine potentially, and keep it invisible to the player too.
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Aug 30, 2021 20:27
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Danger - Octopus! posted:Wrote an IF game in 3 days using Ink for a game jam. My read of Ink is that where Twine offers a lot of customization in presentation and interface, right down to editing the CSS like it was a website, Ink is designed to create a more literate experience with a standardized display and a lot of tools for weaving narrative strands together seamlessly. And they both have more mathematical tools out of the box and are a little more programmery than Choicescript. Does that seem about right?
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Aug 31, 2021 06:29
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Fuschia tude posted:My read of Ink is that where Twine offers a lot of customization in presentation and interface, right down to editing the CSS like it was a website, Ink is designed to create a more literate experience with a standardized display and a lot of tools for weaving narrative strands together seamlessly. And they both have more mathematical tools out of the box and are a little more programmery than Choicescript. From what I understand, you have to do the presentation stuff in whatever you're plugging Ink into - Unity, Godot, other game engines, just a wrapper webpage. It takes more skill than basic CSS stuff for Twine, but it can look quite nice.
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Aug 31, 2021 10:08
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Just finished Planetfall for the first time and wow, it's not at all the comedy adventure as the cover depicts is it?
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Sep 1, 2021 03:42
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Just want to put in a recommendation for Road 96, which is on-rails enough to be called interactive fiction. Great game with great writing. Also a new one I just tried out, OPUS: Echo of Starsong which is interactive fiction with some very minor RPG elements. Good story, pretty good characters, nice understated plot and interesting setting.
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Sep 2, 2021 21:02
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Joe Chill posted:Just finished Planetfall for the first time and wow, it's not at all the comedy adventure as the cover depicts is it? I feel like a lot of Infocom games had this background of 'the resident bureaucracy has created a complicated, darkly funny, but also kind of terrifying situation'.
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Sep 3, 2021 03:09
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Danger - Octopus! posted:Wrote an IF game in 3 days using Ink for a game jam. This was fun, thanks. Glad you made saying 'gently caress this' and getting drunk in public park a valid ending.
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Sep 5, 2021 01:08
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Twobirds posted:I feel like a lot of Infocom games had this background of 'the resident bureaucracy has created a complicated, darkly funny, but also kind of terrifying situation'. I mean, this was the era of Reagan and Thatcher. I don't think it was much of a coincidence that movies like Brazil and Robocop and Blade Runner also came out of this period.
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Sep 9, 2021 03:11
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Well, it's been a while, huh. Anyways, IFComp 2021 has just released the games - you can find them here: https://ifcomp.org/ballot/. There are 71 entries this year, down from last year's 103. There are always a few really good standouts, but there's usually a lot of...less great games. Which are which? Who knows! If you're the kind of person who enjoys opening mystery boxes, you should help judge, but if you're just looking for good games, give it a bit.
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Oct 2, 2021 06:58
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MuffiTuffiWuffi posted:Well, it's been a while, huh. You can usually tell from the blurbs and the first few paragraphs of the game in question.
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Oct 2, 2021 09:53
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MuffiTuffiWuffi posted:Well, it's been a while, huh. You get to play a spam filter in the year 2000 as people are getting familiar with this fad called electronic mail. The writing is really funny and kinda cute, but I haven't finished it yet. It has a really sharp turn towards a strange but intriguing concept of existentialism. Try that one out. cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 13:31 on Oct 3, 2021 |
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Oct 2, 2021 23:57
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I finished the and it was really one of the most creative stories I've ever read. I really recommend playing it. It works in browser and even on your mobile.
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Oct 3, 2021 13:38
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cant cook creole bream posted:I finished the and "The" what? The above game about being a spam filter? Or some other game?
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Oct 3, 2021 17:10
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Saoshyant posted:"The" what? The above game about being a spam filter? Or some other game? Yeah sorry, that should have been an "it". Weird phone auto correct.
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Oct 4, 2021 07:47
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Figured it would be something like that, just wanted to make sure you were gushing about the same game so I'd move it to the top of my list to try next.
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Oct 4, 2021 10:23
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So, played some of the games from IFComp. What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed is a quite good parser game about a ghost exploring the mansion they lived in. Because you're a ghost, all of the normal physical actions like taking things or pushing things don't work - you acquire various emotion-based verbs that have spooky effects, and the writing and story are both pretty fun. Taste of Fingers is apparently an English translation of a 2016 Russian game, which surprised me, because it had strong pandemic vibes. You open the game hiding in the back of a coffee shop with your hoard of supplies, and it's extremely...I dunno, like, Russian? It's grim and I didn't much like the protagonist, but I'm also fairly sure I wasn't supposed to. Anyways, it's a horror story, it's good but short, I'd give it a recommend. The Last Doctor is a short story in a vaguely cyberpunk future world where you're trapped in a ghetto and are trying to triage as best you can. Good writing, but super short, and I mean, like, 5 minutes short. Has only a couple of choices. Take it or leave it, it's okay but very insubstantial. And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One is a game about playing a game with a friend, and it's really, really good. If you like parser games, this one is quality, and you'd be missing out if you didn't try it. A Paradox Between Worlds is a ChoiceScript game about fandoms and it's also really, really good! It's going to be very familiar to anybody who's Extremely Online and maybe a little impenetrable if you're not but if you're readying this you're probably also Extremely Online anyways. The Miller's Garden is marked as Experimental, and it's, uh, it's that. It has nice pictures, and nice sound, but it's also not implemented very well (the page jumps around, it steals your focus on every page load) and it's not super novel, and it's kind of a pain to play. I'd say skip.
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Oct 5, 2021 04:16
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I enjoyed The Best Man. It's in the vein of Bond's previous game Rameses, if you enjoyed that. Kind of a spiritual sequel.
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Oct 5, 2021 05:04
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4X4 Archipelago is a fairly impressive sandbox RPG done in Twine in the style of the Fabled Lands gamebooks. I Contain Multitudes feels like it's a first draft that never got revised into a good game. Megazver fucked around with this message at 08:57 on Oct 5, 2021 |
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Oct 5, 2021 08:51
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I feel bad that I grew up with Infocom games but don't have much tolerance for long parser games anymore. D'Arkun and Dr Horror's House of Terror turned into slogs almost right away, but The Libonotus Cup was pretty good. edit: I shouldn't say slogs, but they're long games that just didn't spark any interest in me to keep going. Twobirds fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Oct 9, 2021 |
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Oct 9, 2021 00:50
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https://twitter.com/reflexfiction/status/1476856520335892508 After several years of trying, I've finally managed to publish a Choose Your Own Adventure short-story in a literary magazine! I present to you, the world's first flash-CYOA story, clocking in at 994 words and featuring eight endings and an inventory system. SimonChris fucked around with this message at 11:18 on Dec 31, 2021 |
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Dec 31, 2021 11:10
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SimonChris posted:https://twitter.com/reflexfiction/status/1476856520335892508 nice
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Dec 31, 2021 13:25
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I just got Vampire the Masquerade - Night Road (it's on sale) and it's been pretty fun. Already tried two different characters that led to completely different outcomes. Give it a go if you haven't yet.
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Dec 31, 2021 14:26
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 https://amnesia-restored.com/ AMNESIA by Thomas Disch has been released in a digitally remastered version, featuring graphical elements and cut content that didn't fit on the original disks. Amnesia Restored posted:Amnesia: Restored offers four modes of gameplay for players to experience: the original Apple IIe, Commodore 64, and IBM PC, and the new web-based, contemporary mode for today’s computing devices. It also restores the portions of Disch’s manuscript omitted by Electronic Arts when it published the game in 1986. Other features include an easily accessible x-street indexer, interactive map of Manhattan, list of commands, address book, and 3D inventory of assets. Originally released in 1986, Amnesia was one of the first attempts to create a proper interactive novel (envisioned as "bookware" by the publisher) by an established SF writer. In addition to a sophisticated plot, it also contains a detailed simulation of Manhattan, with more than 4000 locations. Disch was supposedly disappointed that the SF community ignored the game and didn't treat it like a serious work: https://www.inform-fiction.org/manual/html/s46.html posted:Thomas M. Disch, another novelist of real powers, went through a wild surge of enthusiasm writing ‘Amnesia’ (1986), to be followed by total disillusion when it was not marketed and received as a novel might be. “The notion of trying to superimpose over this structure [i.e., the adventure game] a dramatic conception other than a puzzle was apparently too much for the audience.” (Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers, 1990). With the entire manuscript restored, this is effectively a lost Thomas Disch novel that has not been fully published previously.
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May 4, 2022 08:52
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That's very cool!
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May 4, 2022 11:39
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Inform 7 is open-source now and somehow this didn't get posted here. intfiction.org release post Source code in human-readable form Relatively to the previous releases, this is mostly just an absolute shitload of internal cleanup, refactoring, and bugfixes. One exciting bit, though, is that it now has a new IR (inter), which retains the existing I6 and index backends (producing a z-machine compatible game file and an HTML version of the game source, respectively), but is also designed to make it easy to plug new backends into it, and comes with one new backend that emits C, which opens not just possibilities like "use I7 to author your NieR-style game-within-a-game text adventure and link it into the game proper as a library", but also stuff like "use I7 for world modeling and keeping track of what the player can and can't do as a component of a game that has a completely different interaction modality and doesn't resemble parser IF at all". Also the possibility of using the Inform Library command parser for things that aren't Inform games, which is pretty exciting.
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May 4, 2022 16:42
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Oh nice, this thread is still going. I will have to check AMNESIA soon. I just installed Frotz on my tablet, so this should be an easy way to play a couple of new games before bed time. Question, though, which one should I look into first (that isn't Anchorhead)? Recommend me your favorite(s) that are available in Frotz, please.
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May 4, 2022 16:45
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Saoshyant posted:Oh nice, this thread is still going. I will have to check AMNESIA soon. Searching the IFDB by "system:Inform" should get you started. https://ifdb.org/search?searchfor=system%3AInform&searchgo=Search+Games Every result on the first page if you sort Highest First is solid, but Superluminal Vagrant Twin is my favorite.
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May 4, 2022 16:54
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Saoshyant posted:Oh nice, this thread is still going. I will have to check AMNESIA soon. My personal all-time favourites are Spider & Web (zarf), All Things Devours (half sick of shadows), and Slouching Towards Bedlam (Star C. Foster). Honourable mention for wordplay to Counterfeit Monkey (emshort). Also, if you're ever short on ideas, looking at the history of IFCOMP winners and picking any frotz-compatible games that made it into the top 2-3 over the last few years is generally a reliable source of solid games.
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May 4, 2022 16:57
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Do MUDs and their modern equivalents like the many text-based Discord-server games count as Interactive Fiction? I've been looking for a place to post about that stuff since I've been getting into it, and I'm not sure what the right thread is since they aren't really called MUDs anymore and I don't know what they ARE called, aside from the fact that I'm enjoying them quite a bit (and the old Twinoid game MUSH was faithfully, 100% recreated in one of the discord servers I'm on, and then actually improved upon in several ways when people wanted more). I'm guessing the ones I'm playing right now (Respored and Kobold Legacy) probably have too much, uh... gameplay(?) and lack enough narrative to qualify? Some of them almost certainly do count as IF, there's a bunch of poo poo you can do with a discord bot, but I don't play any of those so I can't talk about them. Is there another better thread to talk about the more MUD-type things?
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May 4, 2022 17:03
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Thanks for the suggestions and the instructions on how to find even further games to check in the future. I'll give Superluminal Vagrant Twin a go first because the premise sounds pretty neat! I'll also try to check Spider And Web afterwards. GlyphGryph posted:Is there another better thread to talk about the more MUD-type things? Definitively, the long running MUD-specific thread.
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May 4, 2022 17:07
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GlyphGryph posted:Do MUDs and their modern equivalents like the many text-based Discord-server games count as Interactive Fiction? I've been looking for a place to post about that stuff since I've been getting into it, and I'm not sure what the right thread is since they aren't really called MUDs anymore and I don't know what they ARE called, aside from the fact that I'm enjoying them quite a bit (and the old Twinoid game MUSH was faithfully, 100% recreated in one of the discord servers I'm on, and then actually improved upon in several ways when people wanted more). https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3903080&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
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May 4, 2022 17:08
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Right, thanks! I never thought to check in retro games!
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May 4, 2022 17:12
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GlyphGryph posted:Do MUDs and their modern equivalents like the many text-based Discord-server games count as Interactive Fiction? There's a discord bot that lets you run IF in a channel. I was needling a friend to try and play Planetfall through one a while back. I'd love to hear about a Discord channel that itself was a game where all the rooms were bot-managed w/ commands. That'd be pretty neat I think.
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May 4, 2022 18:23
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Megazver posted:Searching the IFDB by "system:Inform" should get you started. Checking this list, I really liked Spider & Web, Savoir-Faire, 9:05 and Christminster. In general Plotkin, Short and Cadre all have fantastic offerings.
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May 4, 2022 18:28
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Potsticker posted:There's a discord bot that lets you run IF in a channel. I was needling a friend to try and play Planetfall through one a while back. The ones I'm in right now, one has two channels for each major location ("dens"), and then separate channels created and destroyed on an ad hoc basis for groups of people as they move around the map ("parties"). So you can have access to up to three channels at a time but usually only have one. The other one has dedicated per-player channels that have your visible actions broadcast out to all the other channels if you do stuff in the same "room" as their players. In both of them, all the rooms except the "OOC chat" channels are actively managed and maintained by the bot responding to whats typed into them. I feel like there's a lot of potential for some really cool, more traditional interactive fiction stories there, but I haven't seen them done. Its hard to know whether or not they exist though, since its all niche of a niche stuff.
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May 4, 2022 18:41
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GlyphGryph posted:The ones I'm in right now, one has two channels for each major location ("dens"), and then separate channels created and destroyed on an ad hoc basis for groups of people as they move around the map ("parties"). So you can have access to up to three channels at a time but usually only have one. The other one has dedicated per-player channels that have your visible actions broadcast out to all the other channels if you do stuff in the same "room" as their players. In both of them, all the rooms except the "OOC chat" channels are actively managed and maintained by the bot responding to whats typed into them. That's fascinating and does sound like basically proto-MUDs for the modern age. I'd love to check one out if you'd like to drop a link here or in PM. I was messing with discord bot programming for a while for something a bit more-- irc game esque and the idea of doing something that more emulates a MUD or IF isn't something that had occurred to me at the time so this sounds v. exciting!
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May 4, 2022 18:45
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I posted more about them in the MUD thread but the two I'm playing are Mush: Respored and Kobold Legacy. The first one is a mafia derived social deduction game that reminds me a bit of Spacestation 13 (but far less expansive), and the second one closer to one of those team-based multiplayer survival games like Rust.
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May 4, 2022 18:52
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