Open thread: Offbeatr

Probably most people are familiar by now with crowdfunding initiatives, most notably Kickstarter. There's actually a site called Offbeatr.com that focuses on adult projects, including instances of adult, freeware games that have been crowdfunded through the site. A third Legend of Queen Opala game appears to be approaching full funding within days of starting, despite setting an ambitious $30k target.

I would assume that the AIF community by itself is not likely so big (or at least so engaged) as to support such a funding model, and simple "donation" systems have never really worked out for AIF. Nonetheless big AIF projects are getting bigger (and rarer), and things may be changing in adult game freeware, so I wonder if Offbeatr will ever be relevant to AIF. What do you think?

Development Diary: X-Men: Amnesia

“I always feel these types of games are risky, simply because you are using characters with well-established personalities. You run the risk of completely butchering them for fans of the series (such as myself), or not defining them well enough for people who are not fans.” ~A. Bomire in a review of X-Men: First Day at the Institute

The above is some great advice that I am now going to mostly ignore and desperately hope does not come back to bite me in the ass. This is an announcement for a game I’ve been working on to take place in the Marvel universe featuring the X-Men.

Update 3-3-2014: I'm releasing version 0.1 of the game. Note the version number, very far away from anything that resembles a complete game. You can explore the map and see the first few scenes which might give a clearer indication of what I'm going for than my text explanation. If you are looking for a game or any adult content this won't satisfy you. If you want to see the design and where this game is going then a quick little run through might be interesting. It is probably filled with typos and stilted writing, but I'm more worried about just getting the concept down at the moment.
Upload link via Mega

Study Date v0.9 by Karrek

Reposted from aifarchive on behalf of Karrek

"So I've just completed my first AIF game: Study Date.

"You play as a teenager whose parents have gone out of town, and you've managed to convince the girl you've had a crush on for forever to come over to study.

"The current version is 0.9. It should be content complete (though if you find any missing or placeholder descriptions please PM me to let me know) and mostly bug free, but it's possible there are still a few things I've missed. It can be downloaded from the files section under Inform.

"If you find any bugs or anything that looks incomplete please let me know by e-mailing me at this e-mail, which is also included in the Read Me.

"There are still a few things I'd like to add, specifically more alternate descriptions of the various actions and conversation topics, but I've gotten to the point where it feels complete, and if I hold it back until everything's perfect I'll never release it.

"Enjoy, everyone!"

AIF Toolkit v0.5.2

AIF Toolkit v0.5.2 is released. For those of you that don't know, AIF Toolkit is a set of AIF extensions for Inform 7. It's a minor patch but should be backwards compatible. Download it here.

Click below for the list of changes.

Overlooked AIF Games 2

by BBBen

I've got another three overlooked AIF games for you. I guess in some ways this is a bit like an AIF book club, but generally these games aren't going to be anything like novel-length, and I'll always be trying to bring to your attention some things you may not have ever played (or even heard of). The first two in particular lean toward the 'sexually fantastic', while the third is actually the only notable example of AIF 'modding' by someone other than the original author. It's interesting that I actually made these selections and wrote up the article before the recent discussion of modding over on the AIF Archive, but I guess that just makes it timely to post this!

Author Resources

This post is intended to be a list of online resources that might be of use to authors of AIF. Please leave a comment or email editor.aifblog@gmail.com if there is something you think should be added, or if you have any other feedback.

Beta Testing Pool

As part of our commitment to encouraging more and better AIF games, we have set up a list of people who are willing to volunteer to beta test games.

What is AIF?

The traditional answer to the above question has been that AIF is any text adventure that contains explicit (and preferably interactive) content. Such games are the subject of the vast majority of the discussion at the aifarchive Yahoo! group, for example. However, the problem with that definition is that text adventures are a medium rather than a genre. For example, the very first adult text adventure was Softporn Adventure (1981), published by Sierra with a cover that featured legendary game designer Roberta Williams enjoying some naked hot-tubbing with two other women.

Copyright 1981 Sierra On-Line

Some questions to players about images in AIF

This isn't so much an article as an attempt to start a discussion that will hopefully give me some necessary player data. I have been wondering about these issues as I have few means to gather player metrics, etc. beyond feedback and beta testing.

February Open Thread: Where Did It All Go Wrong?

A stack of notes, an array of beautiful characters, a fully laid out map, exciting plot twists, hot sex scenes, and hours upon hours of work; and then you realize your AIF game just doesn’t work and you have to toss pretty much everything. I’ve been in this spot before, a started/half-finished AIF that after a lot of work I realize just won’t work. Time is spent salvaging what you can, but then you make the decision you have to start back at square one.

Authors, even those who might never have had any published, what are the pitfalls that have sent otherwise promising designs down in flames? What would you do differently if you could do it all over? What are the great ideas that live only on your hard drive because they were impossible to bring to fruition? Let’s air them out so other authors can learn from our mistakes.

The month in AIF (January 2014)

January was a fairly quiet month for AIF. Two games (Magician's Nephew by Mr Flibble, and Emily: Sister Attraction by Palmer) are in beta testing. Two other games (Erin's Rescue by Scion of Eros, and Friends and Yearnings by Lost Trout) have been announced.

As far as this blog goes, there were ten posts in January, getting 6814 pageviews. There have been some discussions on the open thread regarding what this blog should be called, and what it should look like. At the moment "AIF Central" seems to be the most popular title. If you have any suggestions, head over there and leave a comment.

If there's anything else newsworthy that we've missed, please leave a comment below. And if you'd like author access, send an email to editor.aifblog@gmail.com and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

AIF Player's Guide

Traditionally, AIF meant an adult game with a text parser (ie. where the player types out what they want to do). The somewhat peculiar vocabulary and syntax understood by the text parser has its origins in the commercial text adventures of the early 80s. These games were designed to run on as little as 16k of memory, so unsurprisingly they were only able to understand a limited number of words. Things have improved since, and today's text parsers are able to recognise comparatively complex sentences. However, the core vocabulary has remained the same and most AIF games assume that the player is already familiar with it. Obviously that isn't going to be the case for people new to AIF, which is why this guide has been written. 

AIF FAQ

If there's a question you think should be answered here, or if you have any other feedback, please leave a comment.

1. What is AIF?

AIF stands for Adult Interactive Fiction. Interactive fiction is a fancy name for the text adventures that were popular in the early 1980s. Thus, the term adult interactive fiction is used to describe text adventures that include interactive and explicit sex scenes.

1(a). What is a text adventure exactly?

In a text adventure the game world is described to the player primarily through text. The player then describes what he wants the character he controls to do, again through text.