2020 Minicomp Results

The voting for the AIF Mini-Comp is over and the results have been compiled. There was much less voting this year than the last minicomp three years ago. I'm not sure if there was caused by the unusual voting system or reduced activity in the community. But let's get to the results.

There were five entries to the Mini-Comp this year:

• The View to Her Apartment by stochastic (HTML)
• Going Down by Louys Bilitis (HTML)
• Amy's Predatory Boyfriend by Lost Trout (HTML)
• The General's Daughter by accofake (HTML)
• Amnesia by Eulexia (HTML)

Thank you again to all these authors for making these games for us to play!

According to the votes, the top three games were

1. Going Down by Louys Bilitis
2. Amnesia by Eulexia
3. The General's Daughter by accofake

Congratulations to Louys Bilitis for winning the 2020 AIF Mini-Comp with the entry Going Down!

Here are the rankings in individual categories:

2020 AIF Mini-Comp Games

The games for the 2020 AIF Mini-Comp are now available to play and vote on. We had a good turnout of games this year with five microcomp entries.

• The View to Her Apartment by stochastic (HTML)
• Going Down by Louys Bilitis (HTML)
• Amy's Predatory Boyfriend by Lost Trout (HTML)
• The General's Daughter by accofake (HTML)
• Amnesia by Eulexia (HTML)

The games can be downloaded from the following link:

https://mega.nz/file/wrB2AQ4a#8ucvI9GYeLyjGkD9pn7tBVCjWqAT6fk33u7ElWskyDs

They are also available for download from here. All the games are HTML Twine games. Double-clicking each file will open the game in a web browser where you can play them.

Please rate the games at this voting site:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeAnnymTc2kTIJbd34xBNGQwqJZdJCffdRrLbLzbz0gn3R1Ew/viewform?usp=sf_link

Voting will run until the end of September 7. The previous voting system worked well despite its minimalism, so I thought I would go even more minimalist this time. This year, your only choice is to give a game either one or two stars in each category. The meaning of the stars is up to you. You can give all the games two stars except when a game needs a lot of work in an area. You can give all games one star except for those you find one particularly exceptional in some area. You can give two stars to the games you like and one star to the games you don't like. Assign the stars as you see fit.

Feel free to discuss the games openly during the voting period.

If any of the authors want to release an update to their games, please just send them to me, though not everyone will necessarily get the updated versions.

Thank you to the authors for making these games for everyone to enjoy! 

Addendum

• These games are NOT playable in Internet Explorer. Please use a modern browser to play these games
• The game Going Down begins with a blank screen with only the words "Monday". Click on the Monday to proceed
• Update 8/21/2020: Amnesia and the General's Daughter were updated with bugfixes
  

2020 Minicomp Deadline Approaching

This is just a reminder that the minicomp deadline is fast approaching. I know that you're all excited about it. There's no way to hold back that deadline. It's coming, and it's going to be great.

Game entries can be e-mailed to me at losttrout at gmail around August 16th or 17th. I can also be reached on the AIF discord.

Minicomp Deadline Extended

Some participants need a bit more time to polish their entries, so the minicomp deadline has been extended to August 16th.

2020 Minicomp Design Discussion

During the Minicomp, authors are allowed to openly discuss their games. Do you want to get feedback on your game idea? Do you need help shrinking your ideas down to fit the minicomp restrictions? Do you just want to share parts of your game with others?

Feel free to discuss things here in the comments of this post, in the #minicomp channel of the AIF Discord, or elsewhere.

2020 Minicomp Announcement

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Should We Have a Minicomp in 2020?

I've been asking around on the subreddit and Discord to see if there's any interest in a minicomp this year after a hiatus of 2 years. There seems to be some lukewarm interest, so it might be worth going through some additional preparations to see if it generates some additional interest.

Is anyone interested in running the minicomp this year? Does anyone have any ideas or opinions about how the minicomp should be run?

I don't know when the best time for the deadline should be. In the past, it sometimes took place during the summer or sometimes when college was in session. With Coronavirus, everything is in flux. Is it best to have the deadline be earlier when everyone is in lockdown? Or later when some people might be back in college? Of course, the deadline always gets extended by a few weeks anyway.

And what should the rules be? BBBen proposed returning to a more traditional format with restrictive rules: one room and one NPC. I've been toying with the idea of trying a different approach. We always receive complaints from people with expansive game ideas who don't like the restrictions. But we still need to restrict the game sizes, and we've already tried restrictions based on word count, room count, and number of characters. One of the hardest parts of writing an AIF game are the sex scenes, so why not try to restrict those instead? I was thinking of a "minicomp romp" that focuses on story over sex: unlimited rooms, unlimited NPCs, but when a sex scene starts, it must be described in only one paragraph and then the sex scene must end. People are then free to build complicated plots or alternately, a shallow sex romp, but still keep things manageable by having short sex scenes. The lack of restrictions might inhibit creativity though or cause people to start inappropriately large projects. On the Discord, people weren't too enthusiastic about the idea of reduced sex scenes and were more generally in favor of the one room, one NPC format.

Any thoughts on any of these topics? Anyone interested in running the minicomp? Discuss below in the comments or on the Discord.

Join the AIF Discord server!

I've set up the official (sure, official, why not?) Discord server for Adult Interactive Fiction! Join the chat here: https://discord.gg/CKcXZww