Ian Finley and my Textfyre game, “The Shadow in the Cathedral”, is now at last free for all to play. You can download the ULX from itch.io here along with some feelies:
…and I’ll post a version to the IF Archive when I get a moment.
A puzzley adventure in a world of clockwork cathedrals, Shadow was nominated for a bunch of XYZZYs on release. This is its first non-paid release.
cheers!
jon
[On a personal note; thanks to David C for this, and for putting the game together – I hugely enjoyed the experience of collaborating with Ian on the game, and the system David put in place separating writing and design helped us, I think, to make something which did both aspects better – certainly, Shadow is some of the best in-game writing I’ve done. It also seeded my own thoughts about how to make IF creation better, which I’ve carried through into work at inkle. The “deluxe” version of Secret Letter was also ahead of its time in starting to imagine how IF could become something beautiful outside as well as in. I hope work in this direction continues.]
I updated the itch.io page to include a separate game-file link as well as a hints link.
Jon and Ian are probably my two favorite post-Infocom IF authors, so needless to say…Shadow is something I’m quite proud of…being able to pull those two guys together. It’s really IF History.
If it’s now free, would you be OK with me adding Shadow in the Cathedral to my online collection? Even the 1.2 version (which was commercial), just for curiosity’s sake?
I know you’ve already worked hard on this, but is there any chance of a TADS release so everyone can play? Mobile devices don’t like Glulxe, and online platforms don’t like mobile devices.
TADS and Inform are quite literally like apples and red potatoes. They look somewhat similar, but they are not at all alike. There is no way to do what you ask without completely reprogramming a relatively large game in TADS. The source is going to the archive at some point, so when that happens anyone is free to port it.
Did you mean the format Glulx (without the E?). I can testify that iOS Frotz runs Glulx games very well - sans sound and border colours, but everything else is good, including graphics. But I’m not contradicting your overall point (it’s hard for lots of Glulx games to be played on mobiles or online in general, by lots of people.)
Yeah, at this point there’s not really a great Android glulx interpreter. Kevin Boone put together a way to play glulx games through a 3rd party terminal app. His directions for that are here. You could also try the experimental version of Twisty, which can also handle glulx files (though it’s somewhat clunky and glitchy.) I can verify that it does play Shadow in the Cathedral, but doesn’t look all that pretty.