Author Archives: Ryan

IFComp 2013 is OVER.

FINISHED. Here are the results.

The winning game, Coloratura, definitely deserves its victory and its .41-point margin over the second-place game. If you haven’t played it yet you have got to get on that.

I am very proud of the second-place game, and I’m immensely grateful to Emily Boegheim for all the hard work and genius she contributed.

I’m also very glad and kind of astonished that my other game got fourth place. If you look at the statistics, Captain Verdeterre beat Tex Bonaventure by only a hundredth of a point, and Tex beat Solarium by the same tiny margin. A very serious and interesting game was edged out by two very goofy games by a very narrow margin. You ought to give Solarium a look is what I’m saying.

With 35 games in the running, one will naturally expect some games that are not that great, but a lot a lot of these games are quality pieces of work that deserve your attention. Go ahead and direct your attention to these games.

I’m planning on releasing the source code from both games I worked on, and I have some words and thoughts about Captain Verdeterre to broadcast, and maybe I could stand to pretty up this page a bit, and now this post has become a checklist purely for my own benefit. This post is OVER.

IFComp 2013

The 19th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is going on right the heck now. Go look at it. I’ve entered two games:

Captain Verdeterre

Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder is about pirates. The cover art above was created by Caitlyn Harris.

Robin & Orchid

Robin & Orchid is about high school newspaper students who are looking for a ghost. I wrote it with Emily Boegheim.

There are a ton of other games as well. You should play as many as you want, and then you should vote in the competition before the voting period ends on November 15.

Koholint Island in Crayon

THE WIND FISH IN NAME ONLY, FOR IT IS NEITHER

Please click, and view a huge version

I drew this map of Koholint Island on one of those paper tableclothes at a local pizzeria last night.

Koholint is the setting of the fantastic Game Boy game The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, released in 1992. Given limited space, I had to exclude many of the details, but the eight main dungeons are there, along with Kanalet Castle, Yarna Desert, and of course Mount Tamaranch. That guy in the lower left is Link, the famous left-handed hero of Hyrule, and that vague curvy shape at the top is a seagull.

Text Adventure Stuff: HANDLED

I’ve uploaded some browser-playable versions of my IF games—the ones that aren’t already hosted at PR-IF.org (since the versions there are so pretty already). Crucially, Taco Fiction didn’t have any online play available anywhere, at all, so that has been fixed.

If you haven’t had a chance before, I hope you’ll give them a shot. There’s an introduction to Interactive Fiction (c/o the authors of Inform 7) that might help you if you haven’t played this kind of game before.

And please let me know if something is screwed up!

Play Taco Fiction

Play Nautilisia

Play You’ve Got A Stew Going!

You can play Dig My Grave or The Statue Got Me High at The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction, and while you’re there you should check out the rest of the Apollo 18+20 Tribute Album games.

 

Girl of the Horses Galloping Flying Free Ranch

With a gilded finger the sun traced a lingering line up her leg, and her stomach, and across the brass mirror of her shoulder, so that she shone like a reclining Colossus on that dusty beach. All the men gazed on her, and all had to shield their eyes.

“Are you maybe like from Greece or something?” a babbling boy asked.

“No; I am from Montana,” she said, and the crowd hummed in disbelief.

“I didn’t know they had pretty girls in Montana,” another joked, from his seat behind the woman, where he could see down the top of her bikini. From there, he knew, he had no need to fear her frightful glare.

But she twisted her radiant body around like a lithesome cat’s amber tail on her stripèd towel, and fixed him to the spot with sunglass-lenses burning like twin suns: “The girls of the State of Montana are as beautiful as its horses,” she said. “That’s why the girls and the horses get along so well.”

“I’ll tell you all about it,” she said.

Continue reading →

“The Statue Got Me High”: Supplemental Material

The other day, prolific interactive fiction critic “Peter Pears” posted an excessively complimentary review of my IF “cover” of They Might Be Giants’s “The Statue Got Me High”. [Update, September 2014: that review is not there anymore] In the review he called out an aspect of the game that not everybody notices, namely that I stole the plot of the game from the finale of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

The rock song and the Don Juan myth both deal with statues, fire, and cosmic justice, but the similarities apparently are coincidental. A fan must have pointed them out to John Linnell after the song was released, leading him to introduce the song at a show in 1994 saying: “This song is based on the life of Don Giovanni, which I didn’t know when I wrote the song.” Yes: The game is a ripoff of two different artists’ work, and even drawing a connection between the works wasn’t my own idea. Continue reading →