intfiction.org

On the Adrift forum, we have a little topic stickied at the top of the General Discussion section where people can come along and introduce themselves to the forum. Any chance of something similar here so that everyone can get to know everyone else? (Edited by Rioshin: Post stickied)

Assuming it’s okay…


I'm David Whyld, 30 *and a bit* years old, way too much free time on my hands and an obsessive drifter (that’s in the sense that I use Adrift, btw ). I've alternatively wanted to be a world famous novelist and just got hold back by the fact that I can’t write a novel worth a damn. Thus I turned my hand to interactive fiction. So, book publishers of the world, it’s *your* fault I'm here…

Currently working on a huge detective game for the Spring Thing 2007 and I'm in the process of getting my IFComp 2006 finished, excited at the prospect (even if it doesn’t happen) of commercial IF and hoping this forum turns out to be the runaway success it deserves to be.

How do. Mike Murphy, age 27 and living in London UK.

I played my first text adventure on the BBC Acorn back in the early 90s and have liked them, along with 'point and click' adventures since, although not many games I play hold my interest for that long...regardless of how much I like the genre.

A few years ago some members on my forum, which was then primary based on riddles, liked the idea of creating a game based on the background story of my forum. Although we had kicked around the idea of writing our own software for a text adventure, and then with creating our own 'point and click' game, they never really got past the early planning stage. Now the interest lies with creating an RPG, perhaps using Ruby on Rails, but I still like the idea of creating a short IF game as originally planned - so I'll be doing that myself.

The game will be based in a mansion and the player will be required to rescue local children who are being held in a basement by a recluse lion who has now lost control of the mansion to a group of monkeys (um...like I say, it's kindof relevant to the forum background and so doesn't sound like it makes any sense )

Mxx

Hi, I'm David. I live in Indianapolis, USA. I'm 27, and have a degree in English which I'm sadly not using in any professional capacity.

I started playing adventure games in 1986 on my Tandy 1000EX. I never played much text adventures, mostly graphical adventures like Space Quest and King's Quest.

I discovered IF around 2003 or so, and liked what I saw. And here I am.

Two Davids and two Mikes so far... Mike Snyder, 34, from Wichita Kansas (grew up in Oklahoma, but moved back to Wichita in 1995).

My first experience with Interactive Fiction was "The Arconiax Assignment", around 1987. It was a "scratch-and-sniff" adventure game published by Rainbow Magazine for the TRS80/CoCo. That got me hooked. I had been piddling with BASIC for a year or two (TI-99/4a, Apple II, and by then, the CoCo 2). The first text adventure I ever wrote was called "Antartic Adventure" (yes, Antartic -- poor spelling in the title is a good indication of the quality of the rest of that one). I wrote quite a few after that, and submitted them to a subscription software distributor called T&D. For the next three years or so, many of my games (including many that weren't text adventures) were distributed on these issues of T&D (it worked well for them -- which is another reason I think subscription IF might work -- but I digress). I have most of my old CoCo adventure games (and the rest) at http://www.cocoquest.com/ but I lack that first one I wrote (it was never published -- and for good reason), and the last (a self-published game called "The Entity" that is probably lost forever -- a shame, since it might be worth rewriting now).

I've written lots of games and done lots of programming since then: BBS and Worldgroup BBS games, browser-based games, DOS and Windows games, interactive fiction. I'm a programmer by profession, though, so after a full day of work it sometimes feels like *more* work to come home and work on a game.

Well, I guess it's time I wrote a short introduction about myself...

Name's Mikael, age 31. After a few years working, back in school studying software engineering - to finally get the degree for what I've been doing for ages.

I started playing IF, or text adventures as they were called back then, in the mid-80's, and started out writing my own parsers on the trusty C64 (I still like to write parsers on it, in basic, for some weird reason).

A few years ago I stumbled upon the IF community, and ever since I've had the itch to create a game... but as I've mentioned in other posts, I'm not much of a designer or writer - I'm the workhorse that can get the game programmed.

Hi, Ken Franklin here!

I am 45, from Surrey, England, UK, Europe, World, and have been part of the ADRIFT community for just on six years.

My first introduction to text adventures came in the early 1980's with "Philosopher's Quest" from Acornsoft for the BBC Micro Model B. Like many I drifted away from adventure games for a number of years, though I dabbled a bit with "GTAC: Graphic Text Adventure Creator"
by Andrea Gallo on the Acorn Archimedes/Risc Machine in the nineties.

Since finding interactive fiction, and particularly ADRIFT, I have attempted largely unsuccessfully to actually create something that I could be proud to let others play. I have spent a lot of time as Admin on the ADRIFT Forum, edited the InsideADRIFT newsletter for about 20 issues, created Drift On: the ADRIFT Wiki and have organised many ADRIFT competitions.

Hi, I'm Gayla. I'm twice as old as most of the other folks involved with IF, so in a metaphoric sense you can think of me as a little old lady with an umbrella and a very large handbag. I live in Las Vegas and spend my days working at a fairly boring job in the accounting department of a small company.

I played Zork back in the 80's and loved it. So did my children. Then I forgot all about text games until my son Erik came home from college for a visit and installed Winfrotz and Curses on my computer. He said, "Play this, Mom. You'll like it!" He was right. And then he recommended "So Far," "Metamorphoses," and "Savoir Faire."

After that he said, "Why don't you try writing one of these games?"

"Sounds like fun," I said. "How do I do that?" So he gave me the URL of the TADS site. A year and a half later I finished writing "Finding Martin," and then I asked him, "Now how do I get people to play it?" Erik told me about the IF newsgroups, and I found out about all the things I did wrong with "Finding Martin."

I'm in the planning stages for a second project, but I haven't started coding yet. I have too many ideas, and none of them are meshing together cohesively yet. I'm not sure if I'll ever get anything started with a second project. But I had so much fun writing the first game that I don't want to give up trying to put something together.

--Gayla

I think it's amusing that you live in the exciting world of Las Vegas - casinos! casinos! casinos! - and yet your job sounds every bit as unexciting as mine (from here in unexciting little England).

I'm Isxek, a 27-year-old games enthusiast from Manila.

I wasn't really able to get into the "text adventure scene" in the early 80's though I've had brushes with it when I was a kid. It was already late in college when I discovered the site that featured old DOS games which I liked also had a section on Interactive Fiction. Played a couple of games, Googled for more "interactive fiction," and the rest is history.

Writing and playing IF became a more serious hobby after we were able to acquire our own PC. That's when I started downloading the authoring tools and the 'terps. Then Google Groups opened the way to reach RAIF and RGIF. Experimenting with the tools (including one called "Computer Novel Construction Set") led me to using those which required more programming, and there it goes.

Then there was Inform 7...

I am David Fisher, from Sydney, Australia ...

I had a brief encounter with IF as a teenager (The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy - the infamous Babel fish was OK, but I got stuck on the Heart of Gold), but not much other than that.

Last February I discovered the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup, and was fascinated ... I spent a while doing "catch up" work and researching the group archives, which ended up in http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Past_raif_topics (maybe a strange way to do things, but that's just me !)

I tend to be very ambitious in creating games, so I haven't officially released anything yet (other than an Inform 7 extension) ... I have two main things in progress, one of which will appear in a few more months and the other in another year or so (probably ).

Currently running CreatureComp, a mini-comp for creature-oriented people.

Oh, and I'm a computer programmer too.