intfiction.org

Huh, only just noticed this forum!

I'm Michael J. Coyne, aka turthalion. Born in Canada to (at the time) recent British immigrants.

Played IF through the 80s courtesy of an introduction to Zork II by my older brother, and bought Hitchhiker's when it came out (the radio show was played on a local station every morning with breakfast).... still remember the thrill of solving the locked room puzzle in Zork II (thanks to Enid Blyton and the "Five Find-Outers").

Schooled in computer engineering and worked for a number of years designing mobile hardware and doing Windows CE development. Shifted to pure software about 6 years ago doing primarily Linux kernel and driver work for custom hardware.

I drifted away from IF when our Apple ][ went away, but in February 2003, decided to take a look at the state of the art and discovered the rec.arts.if newsgroup, Inform, the Inform Beginner's Guide and all that. Decided to work on my own game for the IF Comp that year and put together Risorgimento Represso.

I stayed active in the community for a while after that, but computer crashes, lots of children, and life got in the way... had an off-and-on sequel to RR planned but got discouraged when all the work was lost with a drive crash. Got back into it in the fall this year during IFComp and decided that seeing I'd missed the 10-year anniversary of RR to release a sequel, I was going to try like blazes to release a sequel for the 15-year anniversary. That seems to be on track with the finished game in beta right now, including with one of the original testers of RR.

I've been hanging around on here for a few months trying to dip my toes back into the community slowly, but mostly staying quiet.

Greetings, all! I'm Doug Maynard. Like so many middle-aged folks, Infocom games were my introduction to IF, and then I fell in love with graphical point-and-click adventure games (e.g., Grim Fandango, Longest Journey). Lately I've started to re-explore narrative heavy and IF games such as Firewatch, Choice of the Dragon, and 80 Days. I am interested in games of all kinds, from board and card games, video games, RPGs, puzzle hunts, escape rooms, Nordic LARP, etc. - though I've played a lot more of some than others.

Being a big tabletop game fan, I've been working on a couple of board/card game designs, but it's occurred to me that I'd like to try my hand at creating IF, given how much I enjoy rich stories and my many years as a D&D/Pathfinder DM. I'm teaching myself Twine right now through YouTube videos etc.

My day job is a college professor at a state college in New York, and in the fall I'll be teaching a game design course for the first time (which has never been offered here). The focus will be on non-digital game design, but I could see collaborating with colleagues in English on an IF type course down the road. Anyway, that's me - I look forward to being part of the community!

Ted Lim, 33yo (turning 34 next week!) here. I'm originally from Las Cruces, New Mexico, but I currently live in Flint, Michigan for school. Former elementary school teacher turned Electrical Engineering Technology student when being a teacher became too big of a financial burden.

My introduction to IF was a little unorthodox. As a kid, on a long car ride, I was becoming the typical overbearing "Are we there yet?" child. As an attempt to keep me occupied, my sister created a map and a story to go with it where I could go in different directions and different things would happen -- fight a group of pirates if I didn't have gold to give them, end up in a field of flowers that put me in an eternal sleep, that sort of thing. It was like a simplified version of Dungeons & Dragons, I suppose, minus the dice rolls. I also vaguely remember once playing some IF game on a Commodore 64 as a child, though I have absolutely no recollection of what game it was. All I remember is that as I was playing it, I was reminded of the game my sister played with me.

Fast forward to my last year as a teacher -- 2016. At the end of the day, after all our work was done, I would make maps and play this same game with my students. They loved it. The more I made, the more creative I got, incorporating concepts we'd learned in order for them to solve puzzles in the game. Then, I remembered that there were digital versions of these games (though I had absolutely no idea what they were called, so finding them was not easy at first). I tried playing some. I sucked. Even the easy ones like Lost Pig (which is quite possibly one of my favorite games to play, although it definitely contends with Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom). So I thought if I learned how to make them, maybe I could get better at playing them since I would then have a better understanding of how they work. I also thought it'd be neat to be able to create an educational game to send to my former students for them to play.

As I started learning how to write IF through Inform, I quickly discovered I actually enjoy writing the games just as much (if not more) as playing them. It's like I'm a god with the ability to create a whole world out of nothing -- that, and I just love creating things. I have two games out right now (both of which are buggy due to my limited programming skills): Just Another Day and A Cock and Bull Story, both of which can be found on the ifdb. I'm currently working on a third game, Journey to Slay the Gods, which is an adaptation of a book I wrote that I never had the courage to try and get published.

My ultimate goal is to finally write a successful and entertaining educational game to send back to my kiddos in Cruces.

Hi all,
My name is Wayne Densley and I have been writing choice-based interactive fiction for more than 25 years. My main focus in that writing has been an online gamebook series called the Chronicles of Arborell and in conjunction with that series running the Windhammer Prize for Short Gamebook Fiction. In these more recent times however, I have been looking at two new projects. The first is to bring the Chronicles of Arborell into the twenty-first century and develop new iOS and Android titles for the series. The second is to produce interactive chat fiction. This I find particularly interesting because it combines chat fiction, a relatively new type of storytelling form with interactive elements where the reader can influence the process of the story.

Chat fiction is however, a mode of narrative where the story is essentially played out in text conversations between phone users. Everything about the story is inferred from those text messages and including an interactive element looks to be quite challenging. At the moment I am honing my chat fiction skills by writing a series of linear chat fiction stories I call the Graveyard Shift. I will no doubt look to this forum to discuss ideas I have about this as there is a wealth of experience here that I believe will be of great help.

Regards
Wayne Densley
The Graveyard Shift

Gremorgan,

Welcome to the site! This sounds really interesting. I've heard a lot about the Windhammer Prize before.

I've looked at your web page for Chronicles of Arborell. This thing is huge! I saw the flowchart on chronology, and that you said you don't have to read it in that order. Do you have a recommendation on what to read first?

_________________
-My IFDB name is Mathbrush, and I'm @MathBrush on Twitter.

The rough draft of my book on IF history and criticism is available at https://www.dropbox.com/s/xd2isl3tk7dxt97/learning-text.pdf?dl=0

I'm Oliver Frank, though online, I go by Knight Otu almost everywhere. I've taken part in ClubFloyd since last August, and I have a single released IF work to my name (Finish your Foe, released as part of Tale's New Year's minicomp). That is something I hope to remedy soon, though.

I couldn't tell you when I was introduced to IF, though remember playing text adventures at a young age (and since many were in English when I am German, not understanding a whole lot). One of the games I remember was one with bauxite in it (I've since found out that it's called South America Trek).

Hi folks. I'm Alexander Newcombe, @WriterNewcombe on Twitter. I've been a life-long IF fan and I'm tackling my first parser IF project. You can play my only released Twine game here (http://www.philome.la/WriterNewcombe/the-jinni/play). I'm a narrative designer for PC/Mobile games by day, but when I want to get really wordy, I work on IF!

Welcome Knight Otu/Oliver and Alexander!

_________________
http://hanonondricek.wixsite.com/pyramidif
https://pyramidif.itch.io/

Hi, I am Almenara, I live in Spain and I love adventures.

I began to dream with Stevenson, Verne, Andersen and Tolkien but when I found out my first Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book in a library all changed for me!! The next step was playing D&D, Shadowrun and Aquelarre during a lot of years with my friends. After a hiatus (maybe 20 years or more) I am back and last Christmas my best friend told me about "Project Aon" and it was amazing. I woke up again!! So many new opportunities you have with Html language. Since then I am reading and trying this new environment for creating my new adventures and rpg campaings. Also I like computers but I have only basic level experience. I have read about IF during these warm weeks in summer and I would like to start programming offline my own adventures with photos, sounds and texts... But all is new for me, I always chose paper and this IF world is a bit hostile for me.

Congratulations for admin/mods/users from this amazing forum because I never thought such an old topic like IF could make a modern forum full of people and ideas!! That indicates the good health of the hobby.

That's all, thanks a lot.

I'm Enrique Henestroza Anguiano, an avid reader and sometime writer of fiction of (leaning heavily toward the speculative and/or literary varieties), and a fairly recent fan of IF, which has opened me eyes to all the ways in which narratives can be enhanced through interactive elements. I'm also a data scientist with a budding interest in analyzing the structural properties of certain types of interactive fiction in a data-driven way.

My only public story so far is a flash fiction piece I wrote for Spring Thing 2018 (The Imposter), but I have a longer choice-based story in progress, and I'm excited to explore this forum and read about all of the advances being made in the space.