Weekly Links #146

Hello, everyone. This week I have few links, and most of them on just one theme. With a few days to go in the Interactive Fiction Competition, Emily Short posted a roundup of the games, and that brings me to the main topic for today.

It occurs to me that this year were launched no less than three highly original IF engines. First there was Texture this summer. Then a game based on Versifier took the IFComp by storm. And Elm Narrative Engine was recently announced. All of them are very welcome, as they open up new directions for interactive fiction, outside of the parser/choice duality. But it worries me to no end that all these new engines, just like Twine, Quest, Squiffy, Undum... basically everything this side of Glulx is all strictly web-based. And while that's oh so convenient in the short term (I do a lot of my own work in HTML5 for exactly that reason), it means a lot of newer interactive fiction depends on a piece of infrastructure -- browser engines -- so large and complex that most programming teams don't have a hope of maintaining or rebuilding it should the need arise.

Perhaps the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation should consider a partnership with Mozilla or something. In the mean time, my upcoming engine is deliberately designed to NOT require any specific technology for implementation. Even the JSON-based serialization I'm going with for now can be easily replaced.

And still in the way of gaming events, another big one ends soon (today, actually). Following its namesake unconference, the Procedural Generation Jam managed to collect 80+ entries, and over ten times as many participants. I didn't have time to check it out this year, but there's bound to be a handful of gems among them -- for everyone. So have fun with them until next time.