70 New Text Adventures Written For 28th Annual 'Interactive Fiction Competition'

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: 70 new text adventures are now online and available for playing — as a long-standing tradition continues. The 70 new games are the entries in the 28th annual Interactive Fiction Competition (now administered by the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, a charitable non-profit corporation).

With wacky titles like "Lazy Wizard's Guide" and "Elvish for Goodbye," each game offers its own original take on the classic choice-based text adventures, sometimes augumented with ambient background noises and even music. Each of the 70 games has some kind of fanciful "cover art" — one even generated using OpenAI's image-generating tool DALL-E.

And you're invited to help judge the games! Just create an account, and then play and rate at least five of the games by November 15...

Slashdot first covered the competition back in 2004. (And in 2006, Slashdot editor Hemos called interactive fiction games "some of the best I've ever played.") But this year the competition raised over $10,000 (so far!) to be distributed among the top two-thirds of entries, with the first-place finisher receiving $489 and each subsequent finisher receiving a little less, with the lowest-finishing prize recipient awarded $10. (And in addition, top entrants are each allowed to choose one prize from a pool of donations.)

Game on!

It's a lot harder than it looks

[Knug_Lidi]

I.F. is hard to do well. It may look easy, and conceptually it is, but putting a story together that still works regardless of the decisions of the player is very hard. Players will do things out of the sequence that YOU want. Players hate being railroaded, and the best IF works are those that have anticipated the major story decision points and write the story to take all of that into account. The Players are still forced to stay within the overall narrative, but it does not feel like being railroaded.

Make the effort and try modern I.F. you will be entertained.

Re:It's a lot harder than it looks

[slack_justyb]

I highly recommend Inform7 [inform7.com]. So much has happened with it in the last few years that I couldn't even do it justice here and instead point you to the most recent talk about it here. [github.io] Most importantly it has become open sourced and building it from source is a very easy github pull and some cmake commands.

It uses a natural language syntax for programming IF and the number of extensions and forums that talk about Inform are numerous. The natural language might take a second for a seasoned programmer to wrap their head around, but once it clicks it makes writing and reading the code much easier.

Read the Disclaimers

[walkerp1]

Public Service Announcement - So, I'm game. I checked in and grabbed a random IF thing. I didn't read the fine print and ended up in some transhomo indoctrination fantasy. Don't be me - read the disclaimers, or rue the day.

Re: Read the Disclaimers

[walkerp1]

Haha, I'll be fine. Thanks for your concern. It isn't even the most disgusting thing I've come across this week since I read the news regularly. Truth is stranger than fiction.

Love to see this

[barrywalker]

I played my first IF game in 1982; A relatively unknown game called 'Zork'. I spent a LOT of my pre-teen/teen years playing IF because that was what we had. I am so glad to see that IF is still a thing, even if it's a niche thing.

Long live IF.

Re:

[walkerp1]

Zork is pretty well-known in some circles, especially Slashdot. I'm pretty sure at least half of the oldbies here have been eaten by a Grue. I remember playing it on a TRS-80 back in the early 80's. What I remember even more clearly is having to debug it on that same platform. I'd say it was one of the more significant things that eventually pointed me toward my IT career.

Re:

[cstacy]

Zork is pretty well-known in some circles, especially Slashdot. I'm pretty sure at least half of the oldbies here have been eaten by a Grue. I remember playing it on a TRS-80 back in the early 80's.

Played it years before that on the original system where it exclusively existed (and where it was written, and actually still being developed to a degree). That was the PDP-10 computer running the ITS operating system at MIT. It was connected to the ARPANET, and named MIT-DM. That stood for "Dynamic Modelling", the group that owned that machine. But we joked that it stood for "Dungeon Machine".

ZORK was written in MUDDLE (aka MDL), the dialect of LISP favored by that group in Project MAC.

Of course we had all

Re:Love to see this

[cstacy]

Writing an IF game inspired by Adventure (Colossal Cave) was a popular undertaking for individual high school students, programming in BASIC, in the mid-1970s. (This was on timesharing computers, micro-computers not really being there quite yet.)

One of the guys in the next high school over wrote a pretty good one. It was quite twisted. I remember three things from that one:

* "A calm pleasant voice announces: Meltdown in 32 minutes..."

* A brutish nurse wielding a nasty looking syringe

And the one that so captured the spirit of ADVENT and ZORK:

* "You are at the Bunny Slope. It looks so easy even a five year old could ski it. Unfortunately, there are no five year olds here to help you."

I don't remember all the things you had to find and perform to keep the snow-topped mountain from blowing up and killing you along with it. It was a pretty impressive game for the time!

Better than TREK, the other most popular program, also chunking and clunking out the yellow paper at about 6 chars/sec on the ASR-33 teletypes we were using. I can still smell the operating mechanism.

Ah, childhood memories!

Re:

[Deep Esophagus]

* "A calm pleasant voice announces: Meltdown in 32 minutes..."

I played an adaptation on the Honeywell CP-6 system we had at college circa 1983. The quirky part that will be forever burned in my memory happened one of the many times you killed a dwarf assassin. Instead of immediately going up "in a puff of greasy black smoke", with his dying breath he babbles out some cryptogram.

Now, I was never good at those puzzles. All I know to do is brute-force it - look for single letters and assume they are either A or I, look for the most frequently used letter in longer words