We successfully revived the AIF Mini-Comp last year. Everyone seemed to have fun making and playing the games. I'm not sure if it's a good idea for it to continue though.
Although the AIF Mini-Comp provides a good focal point for the community to get together, it also causes a few problems. It distracts authors from their other projects. It sucks up the community's energy and efforts and concentrates them on one event, leaving authors too drained to make games during the rest of the year. As a community, it's much healthier to have authors releasing games throughout the year so that there are always games to play and talk instead of just having the community go dormant except for once during the year.
Before the Mini-Comp was revived last year, the community wasn't thriving, but there were still occasionally authors releasing games throughout the year, which kept the community going. After last year's Mini-Comp though, I don't remember any completed AIF games being released. There was a heroic effort by Letwri to run two simultaneous Live AIF games, a few projects were announced on the Reddit, and there was an outside jam that some people entered, but there weren't any completed games that people shared or talked about. I'm not sure if this lack of activity was caused specifically by the Mini-Comp, but it sure is a strange coincidence. The months before the Mini-Comp were much more alive while the months after the Mini-Comp had little activity.
Would it be healthier for the community if we let the AIF Mini-Comp drift away again? What do you think?
Maybe so, if only because it seems like it would be hard to muster up the contestants this year. Maybe next year there could be a game jam or something.
ReplyDeleteThere are arguments for and against it. Activity is good and the Mini-Comp, the way it was done last year with a lot of support along the way, can help get people who otherwise wouldn't even try to release something to sit down and work on the idea they had.
ReplyDeleteThen again, there's merit to saying that it might drain too much energy from some authors to release something else.
Maybe the Mini-Comp should be a biennial event?
But it might be smart to still have something in the gap year, perhaps a competition for longer games, or a challenge to turn Mini-Comp games into feature-length AIFs.
I'm still kinda sad that Amy the Slut was never expanded on - games like that work well in the Mini-Comp format but could be even better if they had a little more meat to them.
I think a transition to game jams would be a good idea, personally. The voting is a pain in the ass to organise, anyway.
DeleteAmy the Slut won't be expanded on. I've become worried that all my games have inadvertently but intentionally all been heavily misogynistic. I knew each game would be misogynistic when I started writing it, but I didn't realize that all of my games would end up that way. Although Amy the Slut was intended to be a bitter-sweet romance about slut-shaming, there's no way I have the time to write enough to get to that part of the story. I find all the mini-comp stuff so exhausting that I can't even finish Happy Birthday, with Love, Your Friend Rachel and that's a much smaller story.
DeleteGame jams are fun, but the Mini-Fest from two years ago was not too popular.
Trying to remember if I played Amy the Slut, feels like forever since I last sat down with a game.
DeleteI can sympathize with those worries though, I sometimes feel I am getting a little set in my ways as far as my style and topics that I cover. I feel like I probably overdo cheating and swapping theme-wise, which makes me wonder if I'm just writing crappy main characters who can't keep their love interest or slutty female leads without any real character ...
I'm not entirely sure I'm familiar with what a game jam entails; I've honestly never gotten involved in community events before, usually due to time constraints.
This is definitely an issue, and why AIF sometimes feels like its relegated to a tiny corner of interactive fiction. Sex isn't the problem as there are lots of popular sex games (although these are usually VNs or have graphics of some type.)
DeleteTwo specific things I can speak on:
Sex-shaming really turns some people off. A lot of hetero AIF writers love "the slut" character, and that's fine for your game to be sex positive and for people to enjoy sex, but it's good to investigate whether you're inadvertently "slut-shaming" your characters in authorial voice rather than that of characters. It's one thing to say "well, that's the story", but there are ways to tell a story without putting across that enjoying a lot of sex is a bad thing. Don't fall into the "men having lots of sex=high five, women having lots of sex=dirty whore" trap.
Don't reduce people, women especially, to objects. To some extent, all NPCs are basically text slot machines, but I played a game recently where the female character existed solely to be killed and possibly raped after death, or subdued and raped cruelly while alive. No backstory; she walks in the room and those are your choices. Don't do this. Women who only exist to have something stuck in them, whether it be a weapon or a sexual organ is quite off-putting to many people.
My games specifically indulge in sex shaming because that shame can be erotic. That's fine for individual games, but it started to become a theme. I was very concerned that in the middle of the #metoo movement, someone was asking where to download my game Office Harassment (it's not even about that!). And the only game I've made that doesn't include non-consensual sex is called Amy the Slut, which revolves around preying on an emotionally fragile woman. I really should try to branch out into alternate themes.
DeleteIf your games are indistinguishable from "Super Seducer: How to Talk to Girls," can you really claim that it's different just because it's a sex fantasy?
A game jam would be the Minicomp with no rules and no voting at the end.
Delete@Lost Trout - And that's *fine*...there's no problem catering to a niche if you and others find it sexy, but it's hard to expect a game to find wide acceptance based on the same types of marginalization that may have been overlooked and thought of as normal a decade ago.
DeleteIf you've heard of Ladykiller in a Bind - which is all about D/s and bondage and spanking - it gained a wide female fanbase who enjoyed it except for one non-consensual scene that was so different from what came before and upset so many people that Christine Love ended up taking it out.
Of course, there's a different kind of fan-loyalty and accountability required for a commercial VN on Steam than there is for a free text adventure.
Every once in a while I dole out some variant of this piece of advice, and I think it applies again:
DeleteMake what you want and don't worry about whether everybody will like it or not. These are FREE games, not Disney movies. The goal, I hope, isn't that every deviant in the world loves you. The goal is to make a good game. And I've found that if you make your game with love and care, it generally finds a receptive audience.
So if you don't want to make a misogynist game for whatever upcoming comp, don't! Make a game about a bunch of women already in love who all agreed they wouldn't fuck each other until they won a hide-and-seek tournament, if that's what floats your boat. But if Burnout came back to make a sequel to A Goblin's Life with all sorts of non-consensual sex and drugs and interspecies sex, you can bet your ass I'd be playing that first. Because that's the sort of thing that appeals to me, and not lesbians in romantic love with each other.
That's what I said. I don't feel like writing more misogynist stories so I'm not going to. We live in an age where a president sleeps with porn stars and makes unusual comments about his own daughter, where another president is sleeping with his high school teacher, and where a vice-president is so overcome with sexual urges that he doesn't trust himself to be in a room alone with a woman. No one cares if I write misogynist stories. I want to stop because it's lazy.
DeleteBleak stories with innocent girls are my crutch because I'm naturally bleak and it's easy to write procedural stories with a story arc using an "innocent girl seduction" framework. Those stories always end up with a misogynist feel. I don't find those scenarios to be more erotic than other ones, just easier to write. So I will try writing something else.
I think the comp should be biennial. In the gaps between comps, we could bring back the minifest, or Sneeze Comp, or any other sort of competition. (Game jams would also work.)
ReplyDeleteHow about an event called the "If You Write It, They Will Come" Writing Salon. During the salon, writers can post a transcript for a game that follows a set pattern, and then coders will make a game from it. The coders will not do any writing though. They will only cut and paste text into some code, so the writers have to do all the work.
ReplyDeleteAs a writer who abjectly loathes handling anything programmatic or technical while writing I approve this message. It helps me with writing about fiddly bits when I'm not messing about with all those technical fiddly bits; heck, the thought of designing a simple blog derailed me from those Live games you mentioned above. I don't know if many other writers have similar issues or not but I can say I much prefer to just get into the zone and start typing away at the story myself.
DeleteLetwri
I also have a hard time writing and programming at the same time. I usually write stuff separately, then go back and program it up. I'm rarely in a mental state where I can write and program at the same time with good results.
DeleteYou said that one problem is that it "distracts people from other projects". What about just making it an "AIFComp" with no restrictions so people can enter their main projects?
ReplyDeleteI know the idea of the limited minicomp is to encourage new authors to make a small game, but if that's a distraction, it is counterproductive. Maybe the comp could have two categories: Finished Game and Demo Project to provide people to get feedback on unfinished ideas as well with less stress.
And the formal voting doesn't matter so much. The threads where people individually ranked and rated the games and provided their thoughts were the best part.
So I vote to make it more of a jam or an exhibition that people can look forward to. Deadlines are the best motivator, and having a time where everyone can come together and "whip out what they got" so to speak and show off their work is the main point in my opinion.
Make it an AIF Expo, or "If You Got it, Flaunt It-Jam" and lets see what everyone comes up with without the pressure of having to make a finished game or the restrictions of rooms and characters.
I would favour this kind of approach. Whether a project is big or small, CYOA or parser, finished or unfinished, it doesn't really matter. Just submit it, and we'll all have something new to talk about for a couple of weeks. I know that's really what I want out of the minicomp.
DeleteOn that note, I'd avoid formal public voting. It's an unengaging way to collect feedback, and I agree that hearing everyone list their thoughts about the games was the best part last year. Voting for contest makes it too easy to avoid that kind of interaction.
@Hanon
DeleteWe did try an exhibition without voting two years ago with the Minifest, and that ended up only containing entries from the Writing Salon. Although deadlines are a good motivator, competition is a strong motivator as well and it makes the deadline feel more real. The Minifest could have been run better though.
I'd still be worried about concentrating too many releases into one period and then having the community go dormant during the rest of the year.
@ArdRi
DeleteGenerating discussions about games is hard. I think there's some weird psychology thing going on. The voting helps because it forces people to play a lot of games that they might not otherwise play. It gives players a deadline. The voting process itself forces players to form a solid opinion and to express it, which makes it easier to state their opinions publicly in forums too. Then, once there's a start of a discussion going, others feel less shy about joining in with their opinions as well. Without the voting, I doubt there would be much discussion about the games. One alternative would be to get someone like ExLibris to write some initial hot take reviews of the games so that others would be less shy to then pile on with their feedback afterwards as well.
I've been tempted to do some PUA-level BS and hide enticing sex scenes behind guess-the-verb puzzles in my games. That would force players to ask for help on forums, which would generate buzz about the game and encourage others to write comments.
@Lost Trout
Delete"concentrating too many releases in one period and then having the community go dormant during the rest of the year" - isn't that sort of what already happens? It seems to me it's a matter of "dormant without a comp" or "dormant and then active during a comp". The mainstream IF has this same exact problem. There are releases daily on IFDB that sink like a stone without the attention a comp gets. I think it's better to get an active period than not, and not worry that releases are concentrated when people will actually be playing and discussing them.
I think people are leery to enter something with a lot of restrictions - there are always lots of posts about "is it okay if I have X number of rooms and this many characters?" I think removing the restrictions and saying "Enter what you want, either as a finished game or a demo" would encourage people to release during a comp and finish stuff more often. I've found the minicomp restrictions a little bit of a discouragement since I can't fit some of the ideas I have into "twelve rooms and one character" or "one room and four characters" or anything in between.
@Lost Trout
Delete"I've been tempted to do some PUA-level BS and hide enticing sex scenes behind guess-the-verb puzzles in my games. That would force players to ask for help on forums, which would generate buzz about the game and encourage others to write comments."
So, I didn't go with guess-the-verb, since people don't like that, but I did make some of the content in PAL quite hard to get and based on hidden secrets, even though most of the content is quite easy to get. That was, in part, to give the community something to talk about so they could collectively hunt and catalogue the secrets. I also did that because having lots of secrets everywhere is fun, but one incentive was to get people talking a bit. :)
That said, a big result of that is that players constantly pester me for a walkthrough, which I don't think I, as author, should particularly be providing. So that's annoying. It took ages before anyone put a proper walkthrough together.
@BBBen
DeleteI've found that people appreciate a "high level" walkthrough which doesn't give absolutely everything away, but points them in the right direction. It is usually more satisfying to find things rather than have them spelled out.
A blank achievement list or a score or a progress bar motivates some people a lot more than one might think. I set the max score for a game once (where the score didn't make any difference at all) at 999,999 and this *infuriated* some people who despaired of ever reaching it.
Oh - another way to get people in would be to hold the jam on itch.io. That might also automate the deadlines and the voting. You just need to specify that the jam is for text games or text games with images to avoid people entering every side-scrolling GameSalad platformer with boob sprites in there.
DeleteLots of good ideas for alternative events instead of the Minicomp. Is anyone interested in running one of them?
ReplyDeleteI'm looking forward to attend such an AIF Revue or MiniComp this year. And itch.io is a quite crowded place.
ReplyDeleteP.S.
Wondering where the Overanalysing-AIF posts are? They always provided a well-written insight into best practices as well as pitfalls.
I believe the editor.aifblog e-mail on the right of this page still goes to the author of the Overanalysing AIF blog. You can just e-mail them and ask.
DeleteI wouldn't really describe Overanalysing AIF as "best practice". It's just one person's opinion.
DeleteAnyway, I've made the decision to pull the plug on that blog. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while given how little I've written over the past couple of years.
Thank you both for you reply!
DeleteTo me, ExLibris' long-running blog was somehow a last connection to the golden age of lewd text games. Well, at least all those games are yet still playable. So I guess the AIF reddit is the central community place nowadays; gonna be around there then. (Maybe you find some time one day to compile your writings into a PDF...)
I get questions everyday on how to start making adult games. I often recommend starting of making an AIF. I think you should keep the mini comp but try to reach a MUCH larger audicence. People are just not aware of it.
ReplyDeleteFor what it is worth I would say run the comp. Maybe appoint a few 'judges' to make the scoring easier but make it light hearted. Competition to encourage production, but no more.
ReplyDeleteSet no criteria for the game and use AIF in the widest sense. Push it to a wider audience as well.
I'm happy to commit to entering a COYA to the comp.
Having "veteran" judges is an interesting idea - perhaps recruit judges who main job is to publish detailed feedback and give a judges' score, then also pair that with the open public vote scores.
DeleteI wouldn't worry so much with the open vote, unless it is a serious comp with a prize at the end (or it is easy with a poll plugin). I see the goal of this is to encourage people to produce something, and help improve it to make it better. While it is nice to 'win', so many people give up.
DeleteI've decided that I would like to run an "If You Write It, They Will Come" AIF Writing Salon this year. I think it will be interesting to see what sort of games we get from less technical authors. Although there will be a mini-expo of whatever games are finished by the end of the writing salon, I don't think I will have enough time to organize a full AIF expo or AIF competition this year. If someone else wants to do that, definitely feel free to do so.
ReplyDeleteI am aiming to run the Writing Salon from mid-April to mid-July.
I for one always liked the minicomps. The two games I released were for comps, and the comp voting was 90% of the feedback I got. Without it, I'm afraid I would've just been releasing games into a void.
ReplyDeleteThere's still time to run a minicomp for this year.
DeleteI'm worried that there wouldn't be enough interest though. I suspect the Patreons have finally killed the AIF community. In the past, there was never a way for English game makers to make money from selling adult games. Although the hentai community showed that there was a lot money available, Americans were too puritanical to allow anyone to sell adult games online. Now that Patreon has found a way to let people profit from making adult games, there's just so many adult games with such high production values that no one is interested in playing AIF games any more. As a AIF author, I also irrationally feel less inclined to work on a labor of love, knowing that someone else is doing the same thing but making money for it.
What if we did a minicomp that was structured like an actual contest with a prize? We could have a small entry fee, maybe $5, and the pot gets split between the top 3 scorers? Then people could have a chance at a small profit for their time, and it would help provide incentive to make a game.
DeleteI think the AIF authors who would be motivated by money have already gone off and started their own Patreons. The ones that are left are motivated, like you, by comments and feedback.
DeleteI still want to write an AIF game like I said when we talked during last years minicomp. Harley Quinn would still be a wonderful character and I cant find out how to draw nude sprites in daz3d or honey select which leaves me with just AIF. However I am not a fan of the very restrictive nature of a minicomp, it presents a challenge and keeps games small but in my opinion it takes away some complexity and they seem to be over in less than 15 minutes.
ReplyDeleteAs someone newly experimenting with AIF via Twine, I'm fairly sure that my projects would never fit a minicomp's rules (My game is at about 30 mins for a longer branch) and would never have time to write a side project. So for me, I'd probably never enter one, even if I decided to make my work public and could use the feedback.
ReplyDeleteBut... maybe the relatively lower number of free AIF ganes means that it's possible to do non-minicomps of full ganes now. Obviously the number of entries would have to be limited but perhaps they are already limited enough? Or maybe a tournament system could be used where small groups or pairs of judges narrow the field and then unify to judge those that make it through the first cuts. That would interest me a lot more.
That's my 2 cents.
That's the funny thing with the mini-comp. Its rules are established by authors who have finished writing AIF games before, and all these authors think that the mini-comp is a great event for writing your first AIF game. Beginner authors though are consistently frustrated by the rules and find it uninspiring.
ReplyDeleteBefore I wrote my first mini-comp game, I also thought the mini-comp could only yield toy games. I could never fit any of my ideas into the format. One year, I did manage to cram one of my ideas into the mini-comp restrictions, and I learned a lot. I realized that I was just toying around before, and the mini-comp was where I actually figured out how to make a real game. To cut things down to the mini-comp format, I had to understand my writing, my characters, my plot, my themes, and my gameplay on a much deeper level. Before, I just had some ideas for an AIF game. To make a mini-comp game, I had to understand which ideas were important, how the ideas interconnected with other ideas, and which ideas could be left out while still producing the effect that I wanted. I had to justify why every character and every room had to be in the game. I had to weigh different ideas and decide which was more important for the game. I had to learn discernment and judgment. By learning how to cut a game idea down to its bones, I also learned how to put together better games because I finally understood the effect and importance of each piece. It's like how in a good short story, there's a reason why every word is in the story. It's easy to imagine AIF games with tens of characters and side quests, but the games just feel bloated and aimless. After I wrote my first mini-comp game, I could actually explain the role of every character and room in the game and why they were needed for game to work.
I know the mini-comp rules can be frustrating, but I think it really is something worthwhile to do. I consider being able to make a mini-comp game to be a sign that an author's skills have advanced to quite a high level of maturity.