December Link Assortment

Upcoming Events:

The Boston IF meetup for January will be Wednesday, January 6, 6:30 pm, MIT room 14N-233.

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Folks have been continuing to hang out at the Euphoria chat space originally used for the IF Comp post mortem, so if you’d like a place to discuss interactive fiction with fewer technical hurdles and strange commands than ifMUD, there’s another option.

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I wasn’t able to be at ICIDS this year, but Juhana Leinonen was there, and he has written up a description of some of the talks, workshops, and posters from the perspective of someone coming from the IF community. Meanwhile, David Fisher curates a bibliography of ICIDS articles from the past several years that he thinks are particularly interactive fiction-relevant.

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The creators of a room escape game give an interview about their reasoning and process.

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Tell a Demon is an upcoming visual novel featuring characters in a kind of 20s style, and sharing some of the team that worked on Sunrise, the curious fantasy/dieselpunk VN from Spring Thing this year.

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If you liked Phoenix Wright and you liked Hatoful Boyfriend and you like the French Revolution and you would like to see those things meld together into one mildly terrifying whole: here is the trailer for Aviary Attorney (which I have not yet had a chance to play myself).

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Austin Walker writes about Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (the boardgame, not the FMV version), with some comparisons to database-driven storytelling in Her Story and Digital: A Love Story.

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Here’s Javy Gwaltney on surviving as a freelance writer, apropos of the ongoing discussions about how people really make money in gaming and games-related industries.

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Sufficiently Human has a long, detailed post on the work of Kitty Horrorshow, which includes both Unity games and horror Twine IF. (If the name sounds familiar, I previously wrote about Kitty Horrorshow’s contribution to Lights Out, Please, but that’s just a tiny part of Horrorshow’s output.)

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The MIT Puzzle Hunt is a yearly puzzling tradition. 2015’s took place quite a while ago (January, I think?); however, an online version is now available, so if you want you can play for yourself.

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My old post about the making of Bronze, including map design and puzzle layout, has been reprinted at content | code | process, a site that looks at design work in the interactive narrative space. The same site also offers, among other things, background on Blue Lacuna by Aaron Reed, commented creative code by Nick Montfort, and statements by Andrew Plotkin on Dreamhold and on Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home.

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Here’s the story of a birthday party where the partiers created the art of an evolving culture.