Hello, everyone! The annual Interactive Fiction Competition ended just a few hours after my previous newsletter and results were announced a week later.
In other news, we have a couple of headlines from the corporate world:
It's still something, especially in context. But most of us just want to make games, so here's something more useful:
Last but not least: going back to interactive fiction for a moment, The 50 Years of Text Games project is now at 2014, therefore 80 Days, the game that brought modern CYOA into the mainstream. A good write-up, but I remain unconvinced about the game and the tool it was made with. Pretty much everyone I talked to who played it remembers 80 Days as all style and no substance, and Ink was always inscrutably cryptic to me.
(Frankly, it all sounds an awful lot like Fallen London in some ways, and not just because they share an aesthetic. Unfortunately it's all the bad ways, including a lot of fever-dream fantasy that doesn't feel at all grounded, or relevant to anything that actually happens in the story.)
Oh well, see you next month, as this blog begins to wind down.