How is the world of IF?

I’ve been out of touch for a couple of years now …

What has been happening in the world of IF lately? Any amazing advancements or things that would be good to know?

If you’re wondering who this is, I wrote these things: Suveh Nux, Past RAIF Topics, I7 Custom Library Messages.

IMO the biggest change in the last few years is the rise of Twine and other hypertext/choice-based IF. A minority of this year’s XYZZY finalists had a parser, but parser games mostly won the awards.

ifdb.tads.org/viewlist?id=6n4iucezv5elyv57
xyzzyawards.org/awards/historica … 13&round=2

The other big change is that commercial text-based games have had some really big hits in the last few years, especially on iOS (I believe Device 6, A Dark Room, and 80 Days all hit the Top 10 Games in the App Store for a little while) and that the market is sustaining several small IF companies (Inkle Studios, Choice of Games, Tin Man Games) even without “blockbuster” hits.

On a technical front, Inform 7 has developed a lot of features in the last few years, notably adaptive/indexed text, which made Counterfeit Monkey possible. Glulx games are working better and better on the web via Parchment, which makes games much more accessible to potential players who don’t know what an interpreter is.

The functionality provided by our Custom Library Messages extensions is now baked into the core language as of about 3 months ago. It’s pretty nice.

Oh, and there’s this IF Comp thing about to happen. Didn’t you win one of those? :slight_smile:

I have yet to enter the annual comp; thanks for the vote of confidence, though!

Welcome back – good to see you around again!

I think Eric Eve’s work on adv3lite for TADS is worth mentioning.

David, it looks like you’re also responsible for nitku.net/if/namegenerator/?

If so, I gotta say, it’s ridiculously entertaining. (Any chance of an update to include the last couple years?)

It’s mine, actually, based on David’s original (unpublished?) program. I could try to update the database maybe this weekend.

Glad you like it, anyway!

yesssssssssss

Oops, sorry. And yay! It is awesome.

There’s been a few interactive radio dramas in the last year or so (e.g., FREEQ, Codename Cygnus, Papa Sangre)

Not sure if that will be something significant to the world of IF or not, but as far as I can tell it is something new.