TWIFcomp

TWIFcomp results have been posted to the TWIFcomp Organization Page, and scores have been updated on this website for each game.

I have posted some preliminary analysis of TWIFcomp on my blog as well, and will follow it up in a couple days.

Voting has closed for TWIFcomp. Results will be tweeted on Sunday, May 2 at 16:00 GMT. Who will claim the duct tape? We'll see!

A few games drifted in after the deadline and could not be included as part of the competition. I've also seen a few comments around the net lamenting having missed the chance to send in a entry. I can't let all that work go down the drain, so I've created a separate category. Again, these works are not part of the competition and should not be scored.

If anyone else wants to submit a game, just email it to me before the end of the judging period. I'll post them as time permits.

Entries in TWIFcomp are now posted on this website. There were 61 entries in all. Voting on these entries will remain open until 16:00 GMT on Saturday, May 1, 2010. To vote, send me a list of game titles and a rating from 1 (terrible) to 10 (perfect). It would make it easier on me if everyone would enter their ratings on a score sheet, which is provided in excel format. Winners will be announced on Sunday, May 2, and prizes will be mailed out the next day.

TWIFcomp is a competition for short (at most 140 non-white space character) interactive fiction. The background and full rules are posted online (English, French, Russian). This competition intentionally targeted a wide variety of platforms and languages, and you are encouraged to try out the games, even if it means downloading an unfamiliar interpreter, typing on the command line (yikes!), or running some text through Google translate.

I received many more entries than I had anticipated, and have tried to make them all accessible through this website. In the interest of getting the games up quickly, I am not waiting until the website looks perfect -- I'm activating it now, and I'll polish it as time permits. If anyone notices any errors or wants to modify their entry, please let me know by email. Everyone is encouraged to comment (politely) on individual games. I will try to moderate these comments as quickly as possible. Finally, I have a few games in the comp, but will not count votes on those games.

Thanks to everyone for entering!

It just occurred to me that it would make sense to provide some sort of redirection here. I decided that for casual blogging, it would make more sense to set up a WordPress blog.
That's not to say that there are no further plans for this drupal. Oh yes, yes, there are indeed. Big plans. Plans that would completely derail every other project I'd like to be working on, though. So, those plans will likely have to await the release of drupal [insert next number here].

My dear mafia friends -- Having read through various reports about Zynga, the company behind Mafia Wars, I've decided to yank the game from my facebook account. Their CEO went on at some length a week ago, gloating about distasteful things the company did to gain market share. I have no problem with companies that offer free services in exchange for some advertsing or access to information, but some of these reports suggest that Zynga has crossed the line into deceptive business practices.

Dear Reader (and I flatter myself by thinking that there might be one. Even one.),

I have been pulled back from the precipice of forgetting entirely about this whole blogging thing by the completion of Rover's Day Out, an interactive fiction piece mentioned previously in the blog. In fact, if I recall correctly, it was the last thing I entered in the blog before going off the rails entirely.

Rover's Day out is a "text adventure", similar in some senses to the text-based computer games which were popular in the 1980s, but quite a bit updated.

A cool video of the milky way (galaxy, not chocolate) rising. Taken with not-too-exotic equipment.

While working on the RileyCon website, I got sidetracked by needing some 3d graphics, so I took a few days to work on learning Blender. Halfway through that project, I had an idea for a new interactive fiction game, so I'm now digging an increasingly deep ditch in project space by embarking on a new IF project.

The RileyCon site upgrade is poking along.  Upgrading from version 4.73 to 5.16 of drupal didn't break too much, and with some cosmetic retheming (they changed the way that floats are cleared, for instance), everything worked OK and looked like the old site. The next step, from 5.16 to 6.10, was a major leap however.