Monday 25 July 2016

AIF Minifest Deadline

The AIF Writing Salon is winding down, and the deadline for the AIF Minifest is approaching. I originally set the deadline for the Minifest as August.

Is there anyone who's planning on submitting anything to the Minifest? Does anyone need more time?

Sunday 10 July 2016

Writing Salon Weeks 11+: Fleshing Things Out

This post is for the July 10-31 writing event of the 2016 AIF Writing Salon.

Now that you have a playable game, it's time to flesh things out. Add more commands to your game. Add extra rooms. Add puzzles and plot. Add a conclusion. There's three weeks until the minifest, so use your time wisely to enhance your game.

Post the text that you've written for feedback. Ask for programming advice. Put up playable versions of your game that others can try and make suggestions for. Send me your completed works at the start of August at the email address losttrout AT gmail, so I can gather them together and make them available for the minifest. Even if you haven't been involved with the Writing Salon, I will still accept your game for the minifest. Raw game files or .html files are preferred over executable files because they are smaller and are less likely to have viruses. Sometimes gmail automatically discards emails with certain attachments, so if you don't hear from me after a few days saying that I've received your game, please e-mail me asking what's up.

Sunday 3 July 2016

Writing Salon Week 10: Program the Transcript

This post is for the July 3-9 writing event of the 2016 AIF Writing Salon.

It's time to get interactive! Add the commands from your sex transcript into your game. You should be able to play through your game now. Post your game up for people to try and give you feedback about how it plays.

When programming, it's important to not fight your story engine. Story engines are designed to be programmed in certain ways. As long as you stay within the expected structure, the programming should be relatively easy. If you do something that runs counter to the design of the story engine, the programming can quickly become very, very hard. If you find yourself doing a lot of complicated programming, you might be trying to make your story engine do something that it was not designed to do. In those cases, it is often easier to adapt your story to fit what the engine wants than the other way around. Experienced AIF authors are adept at finding compromises between the needs of their stories and the design of their story engines. Feel free to ask for advice.