Sanctuary in Time - Novus Operandi Game Design

I'm Max Ingram, indie developer behind the new text-based, adult title Sanctuary in Time. 

Summary:

Sanctuary in Time is a text-based, god-game management sim with a sci-fi twist! You're the half-blood son of the recently murdered God of Time. When his fearsome beast-like foes try to make you just-as-murdered, you find yourself rescued by a spear-wielding, loincloth-clad woman leaping from a dimensional portal. She pulls you safely to the Citadel, a far-off sanctuary built by the star-spanning people of your father. And now it's up to you to fill its halls with beautiful female followers rescued from throughout history, add structures, upgrade them, and survive the forces that killed your father!

Download page:

https://novusoperandigames.itch.io/sanctuary-in-time

Author:

Max Ingram / Novus Operandi Game Design

Release Date:

Sept 7th, 2022

Platform:

Windows

File Size:

7.96 MB

Genre:

AIF, Sci-Fi, Management Sim

2022 Minicomp Announcement: Minicomp Romp

The AIF minicomp is back! The minicomp is a mini-competition of small adult text-based games. Make a game, submit it to the minicomp, and the AIF community will play them and judge them. 

This year, the minicomp will use a relaxed set of rules:

1. No interactive sex scenes are allowed. Non-interactive sex scenes are allowed in the game, and there are no restrictions on the number or content of these non-interactive sex scenes
   
2. No multimedia or graphics are allowed
3. The game must be winnable (or at least it must have an ending that the player can reach)
4. No playable part of your game can have been previously released to the public before August 25

The purpose of the rules is to make it easier for authors to create games by disallowing complicated interactive sex scenes. During sex scenes, players cannot be presented with any choices over what happens and players cannot be allowed to issue any commands. Before a sex scene starts, players can be given choices about what will happen, but once it begins, players should not be able to influence or interact with the scene until it ends. This restriction means that authors do not need to design any sex mechanics for their games, and they do not need to use any special sex engines or sex frameworks in creating their games. 

Although games with multimedia and graphics are generally not allowed, if your game requires graphical or audio elements as part of its interface, such elements are acceptable.

Archives of Yahoo! Groups AIF Archive

Over the years, the AIF community has gathered in many different places, such as BBSes, the alt.games.xtrek newsgroup, various forums, Discord and Reddit. For many years, the AIF community was primarily hosted by the Yahoo! Groups AIF Archive, and lot of discussion, game hints, and files were hosted there. Unfortunately, when Yahoo! Groups was shut down by Verizon, all of those resources were lost. In order to preserve some of that history, here are archives of the AIF Yahoo! Groups:

AIF Archive

Messages

Files

Internet Archive

AIF Archive 2

Messages

Files

The AIF Archive 2 was a secondary Yahoo! Group used to store overflow files that couldn't be stored at the main AIF Archive due to quota limits

These archives are compressed using 7-zip format, so you will require 7-zip to decompress them. Online file hosting is often unreliable, so if you find alternate hosts of these archives, let me know so that I can link to them.

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.