Textfyre, currently self/un-funded, is looking for help in completing the ports of the FyreVM engine to various platforms, including the Kindle, Android Phone and Tablet, iPad, iPhone, and Mac Desktop. We may look at Blackberry and Palm Pre later.
If you’re inclined and haven’t already seen the notice, please visit:
Also, if the idea is to draw funding from outside the established community, you might ask Jason Scott if he’d consider posting a link to your campaign on his Get Lamp blog. Seems like he’d be sympathetic to both the venue and the cause.
There’s not that much time until this campaign runs out Saturday and it’s only halfway funded so far.
For any IF author or player lurking here wondering how we could expand the audience for IF, I encourage you to sponsor this project. For the price of a movie for 2, let alone dinner or parking, you could help get more folks using IF on Kindle, Android, Palm and other platforms. Please join me and others in helping this project reach its fruition.
This is an honest question because I don’t understand TextFyre’s business strategy; I don’t mean it as a snark.
What, if anything, would this project do that would make it easier to publish free games to these platforms? I ask because it’s my understanding that this is a special platform for selling commercial IF and I personally am only interested in consuming/distributing free IF.
I hope I’m misunderstanding; I hope that this is a general purpose z-code and/or glulx and/or t3 interpreter that could play the available pool of free IF at no cost to the end user. That would be cool, and I would pledge money.
TextFyre is now committed to releasing its software under FOSS licences. So on the open platforms you could use it easily (however games would need to be recompiled for FyreVM. I personally think it would be better to keep with Glk, or to at least include a Glk compatibility layer, but I hope Dave’s decisions work out for the best here.) But on other more closed platforms it’s a lot harder to release new software. I think the Kindle is particularly hard to get approval for. So for those platforms you might choose to use TextFyre as your publisher as they already are approved to release software.
FyreVM is open source at sourceforge.net/projects/fyrevm. All of the current and future code will reside there or if moved, to a similar open source venue.
As a self-publisher, you would still need to register with the various mobile marketplaces on your own. If you weren’t able to register or gain access to one or more of the platforms, you could work with Textfyre on publishing your games.
It’s looking like the Kickstarter campaign will fall well short of our intended goal. We will still continue to work on the platform, but it’s all volunteer work at the moment and some of the platforms are missing volunteers. The Mac/iPad/iPhone code is close to completion, but is sitting idle. We need help completing the engine (including testing) and then getting sample user interfaces developed for each apple platform. We’re building a Java FyreVM, but we could certainly use help on the Android UI side.
In lieu of cash, more volunteers would suffice.
FyreVM is meant for this kind of work. It separates the game from the user interface code which allows each platform to have a custom user interface that leverages its strengths (ipad = touch gestures, kindle = 5-way button).
Authors can still envision multiple window user interfaces, but the implementation would be outside of the game code.