The Creative Process #39 - The Waiting Game

After a long march towards the peak, I finally submitted my games to the Interactive Fiction Comp 2025. There was no more to be done – the games were with the community now.

Judging goes until 15th of October, which is a terribly short time to get through even a portion of the games for rating and reviewing, but as an author, it's incredibly long. I've been very undisciplined and doing laps on my phone between different places I might catch a review of one of my games. I've woken in the middle of the night and checked for results. Not a good way to approach things, if I am to be honest. If you can't be a voice of wisdom, be a cautionary tale.

After four weeks of this, the excitement has diminished a little. I know now that my games are neither the worst games in the world, nor the best, so that's a relief. I've received some good reviews and some gut punches, but overwhelmingly the former. This year's group of games is really strong, which is a little surprising given there is a larger-than-usual number of games overall. Bell curve be damned!

Reviews are coming out at a decent pace: approximately 500 public reviews at the time of writing. This community effort is phenomenal. A collective of 80-some authors have yelled "Hey community, catch!" and thrown their babies up in the air, and every one has been caught a number of times over (okay so maybe I need to workshop the metaphor...)

This IF competition interaction is unique. Usually if you work on a creative piece, you release it and then try to market it with enough momentum to catch on and perhaps be self-sustaining in attention or sales. In IF Comp you'll get focussed attention for a month and a half with a long tail. The community try to review all the games and if one game falls behind the median on the spreadsheet, often people will try to rectify that. As an author you do no pushing at all. There are similar efforts with game jams throughout the year, and even other big name competitions in the community, but IF Comp is a singular crucible for all things IF.

Of course this means certain aspects are exacerbated. The use of generative AI remains viciously controversial. It seems like the community want it banned from the competition, but it is awkward to do that after the comp being incredibly welcoming and supportive for so many other things. Not hypocrisy, but more having to get the mean pants on after being nice for so long.

Cool air of freedom

The primary reward of finishing my games was the ability to do whatever I wanted. I've managed to spend some time working on a genetic programming experiment using bevy. It's supposed to be your classic petri dish experiment like The Bibites. It's fun to do something that isn't writing, and occasionally you can make things wiggle on a screen.

If I can get that to work, I have an idea for a hilarious second experiment – coordinated group river crossing. Little villagers trying to cross a river a la Frogger, but able to help (or hinder) each other. I can't wait to laugh at their pratfalls.

I haven't caught up on the TV shows and movies I've missed. Something about having the freedom to do whatever I want has come with the desire to make it productive, or very anti-productive, nothing in the middle.

I've attempted to review a number of games in IF Comp. I haven't done many, and they are hiding on the author's forum. I've tried to be positive and constructive with my feedback, to encourage the author's forum to be a nice place. And it has! Private discussions with other authors has brightened up many a day. I think my reviews have been poorly written, but I've likely just run out of writing juice.

Diving back in

And despite having the freedom to not think about interactive fiction, my mind has been wandering to my next project, which I think might be The Submariner. The rough concept is you're a person travelling home after a scientific expedition in a small submarine captained by a guy who has lead a long and storied life.

Already my idea of the game has warped and grown over the month. I had imagined a much more intimate, tiny game with just you and the captain and his pets, but maybe expanding it to have other passengers makes more sense.

I had a conception of it being a mashup of various interactive fiction technologies to build a very simulationist type of game as a counter to the idea that I can only write Twine games with minimal branching. I had envisioned it in TADS 3, with the entire environment being very reactive. The windows would show the latest scenery passing, and the ship would creak and react to the environment. The NPCs would react to all of this, and your role as a player was to explore the ship, and play with the simulation.

The biggest problem with this is it's based around scenes and parser games are not so great at it. You can't have the entire journey played out at minute detail while you run out of things to poke, prod and examine. Other games get away with it by having a puzzle or interaction waiting for you in an area, and once that's done, you are whisked away to another location. You can't do that in a submarine.

Another idea I've mulled over is a quality-based narrative structure, like Fallen London or a game I've been playing a lot lately, Cyberpunk Dreams. I could imagine a set of cards being scene "hooks" that you deal with. This greatly reduces the simulation aspect, but does not remove it entirely.

Unfortunately with the games I mentioned, there is an enormous amount of grind and "story between the cards" – implied narrative without any of the hard stuff like the minutia of establishing scenes, continuity, character and stuff like that. There's certainly an art to it, and I have no experience on the design side.

I might try to prototype it a little. I think a long gestation is required for this project. It needs experimentation and a lot of play testing. My IF Comp games were roughly stories with a little bit of interactive width. The Submariner might be as wide as the sea itself.

I also think I've shelved the idea of Puzzle University, a very puzzly parser game. I have a variety of interesting puzzles, but there's a lot more needed. And something about the game isn't quite clicking. I guess it doesn't have a strong core with which to build all the extra stuff around.

Next month

IF Comp results will come out and that will be a relief. I have absolutely no idea how either game will go. Other commentators have said the same. Initial ratings seem to suggest it'll do better on an absolute scale than my previous game Hand me Down, but who knows versus this year's strong and varied competition?

If you'd like to play, rate and review cool interactive fiction games, head on over to IF Comp. You're under no obligation to play my games. I'm happy to suggest some great ones (you are an ancient Chinese poet... and The Little Four are fantastic). Good luck to everyone with a game in the comp!

I'm also helping friend-of-the-newsletter Mike from Armiger Games demonstrate his awesome game Aloft (and others) at PAX Australia. It's been many years since I've been to PAX. Come say hi to us.