James Jolley’s Interactive Fiction Blog

November 16, 2009

“Rover’s Day Out” wins the 15th IF Competition

Filed under: General — James Jolley @ 1:42 pm

Congratulations go out to Jack Welch and Ben Collins-Sussman for winning this year’s IF competition. It was a good year for IF generally, and it’s nice to see the comp still has it’s appeal.

All the best to all who entered.

October 2, 2009

The 2009 Interactive Fiction Competition is now underway

Filed under: General — James Jolley @ 3:26 pm

It’s that time again, IF Comp time. The entries this year seem varied enough, plenty of Inform entries which is always good. The main page is the place to download the games.

Happy Playing.

January 29, 2009

Blue Lacuna is now out of beta

Filed under: General, Recommendations — James Jolley @ 1:11 pm

Aaron’s game, Blue Lacuna, is now completed and out of beta. This game has to be one of the largest works of IF to date, if not the largest. At an incredible 5 MB for the glulxe story, 385000 words of I7 source text, 250000 words of prose, this work sets the standard and truly tests the Inform 7 development system.

As a tester for the work, Aaron has demonstrated his commitment to quality control and overall accessibility. It is highly recommended. The work, plus links to relevant interpreters can be downloaded from here.

Note, according to Aaron, Zoom isn’t recommended, however I did test under it and it’s fully workable for blind players. For the first move, type “screenreader”, omitting the quotation marks of course. This will improve accessibility by listing keywords and relevant conversation topics under the prose.

November 17, 2008

Congratulations for the IF Comp winners

Filed under: General — James Jolley @ 12:03 pm

I want to take time to congratulate the winners of the IF comp. The results are in and Violet came first. Nightfall and Everybody dies were the runners up. Well done to them.

October 1, 2008

The 14th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is now underway.

Filed under: General — James Jolley @ 11:04 am

A quick alert to let folks know that the games for the 14th IFComp are ready for download at this link.

June 19, 2008

Spatterlight gets an update

Filed under: General — James Jolley @ 9:38 pm

Tor Andersson’s Spatterlight, the multi-format IF player has now been updated to version 0.5.0. Changes in this release improve the interpreters used. The Glulxe interpreter has been updated to the latest specification, as have the Alan and Adrift ones. It can of course be downloaded from it’s official site.

A note to those using VoiceOver, games that rely on the status line for contextual information are unusable as VO refuses to see that area of the screen. It is suggested that blind user’s wishing to play games that rely on feedback via the status line use Zoom at this time.

June 3, 2008

Planet Interactive Fiction has a new address

Filed under: General — James Jolley @ 4:36 pm

A quick post to alert those using “Planet Interactive Fiction”, the IF blog/RSS aggregation service. It’s address has changed to a more memorable URL. It can be found now at this address.

May 9, 2008

ifarchive.org gets significant improvements

Filed under: General — James Jolley @ 9:31 pm

The Interactive Fiction Archive has been given significantly more bandwidth, thus giving us faster download speeds. It’s had some majour restructuring to disallow robots and other internet crawlers. All these improvements amount to a better quality of service throughout all the mirrors as well.

April 30, 2008

Are IF bloggers on a different planet?

Filed under: General — James Jolley @ 10:01 am

It would seem so, as a really new and potentially great site has been launched. Christopher Armstrong’s Planet interactive fiction has been devised to “keep” us all hopefully on one planet. The idea is that our blog postings are shown on one page. No more messing with bookmarking everyone’s blog, all new postings to blogs are there an hour after being written. This is possibly one of the biggest things to happen to the IF community in quite some time, and I am sure it will generate a lot of discussion as well.

Happy Birthday to Inform 7

Filed under: General, Inform 7 — James Jolley @ 9:39 am

Who would have believed that 2 years ago this very day, Inform 7 was released? I was away when the actual announcement was made regarding the new system but I have never looked back since downloading one of the early builds in July of that year. It is a remarkable effort of community input and Doctors Nelson and Short really are luminaries in our community and want applauding for there efforts.

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