Tagged: Interactive Fiction Competition
I HAVE THE BANANAAAAAAAA!!!
Okay. So, a while back I announced that I had an entry in this year’s Interactive Fiction Competition: Who Iced Mayor McFreeze? Remember that? Remember the noir murder mystery in which everyone is candy? The follow-up to 2022’s Who Shot Gum E. Bear?
That was a decoy.
Or rather, that was a sincere IFComp entry but it was not my main focus this year. No, this year I had other plans. You see, ever since 2001 IFComp has handed out an award to the entry with the highest standard deviation: that is, the entry that most divides opinion. The name of that award? The Golden Banana of Discord. If you know me, you’ll know that bananas are sort of my thing. Naturally I’ve wanted the Golden Banana for some time now, especially having very narrowly missed out with 2020’s Quest for the Sword of Justice. Seriously, that thing would have been a banana-winner in 2021 or 2022 – it got edged out by just one marginally more divisive game (Little Girl in Monsterland) that particular year.
That brings us to the entry I sank most of my effort into this year: DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS, entered under the pseudonym “Hubert Janus.”*
*Hugh for short.
New Game: Who Iced Mayor McFreeze?
It’s that time of year again! IFComp – the Interactive Fiction Competition – is in full swing and my entry this year is Who Iced Mayor McFreeze?, a follow-up to last year’s Who Shot Gum E. Bear?. Both see you take on the role of Bubble Gumshoe, a street-smart broad with a hard sugar shell but a soft centre who’s also the finest private eye sniffing out mysteries on the syrup-slick streets of Sugar City.
Both are parser-based games (meaning you type “take key” or “smoke cigarette” or “eat Mayor” to do what you want to do), but I’ve tried to take on board feedback from last year’s event so this one takes a different approach to the actual mystery involved. I don’t want to get into exactly how the approach differs this time around – partly because I’m hesitant to offer commentary that might influence votes while the competition is being judged, and partly because I fear it might spoil the challenge for one of them – but early reviews seem to suggest this one is going down well for much the reasons I hoped. At least, I’ve seen a couple of people praise the new direction but nobody lament the departure from the old one.
On the topic of judging, it seems worth taking this opportunity to mention that if you want to get involved in the competition, you yourself can be a judge! All the important details can be found in the competition rules, but the key thing to know is that you only have to play five games (though you can rate more if you want). It’s not a matter of poring over all 75 of the things. So if you fancy checking out Who Iced Mayor McFreeze?, you’re a full 20% of the way to being a judge!
IFComp and ECTOCOMP Results 2022
The results for IFComp and ECTOCOMP are in, and I feel as though my entries did pretty well!
First things first, the big one…
IFComp
Who Shot Gum E. Bear? ultimately took 35th place in IFComp, which is slap bang in the middle of the comp’s 70 entries! That might not sound great at face value, but IFComp is kind of the big league of interactive fiction and the overall standard is pretty high: 35th is actually my second best ranking (with the first being 33rd for Girth Loinhammer and the Quest for the Unsee Elixir in 2019). A good rule of thumb is that anything in the top two-thirds is well worth your time (and I’d say it’s pretty rare to find anything disappointing outside of the very lowest ranking handful of games).
Continue readingNew Game: Who Shot Gum E. Bear?
It’s IFComp time once again, and my entry for the 28th annual Interactive Fiction Competition is Who Shot Gum E. Bear?, a hardboiled mystery that’s not as sweet as it sounds!
This is my first parser-based entry to the comp, meaning that you don’t simply click links to make your way through it. Instead, you type commands such as “GET LAMP” to describe the actions you want your character (Bubble Gumshoe, P.I.) to take. Except there aren’t actually any lamps in Sugar City, so you’re much more likely to be typing:
>OPEN DUMPSTERS
>ASK OFFICER DONUT ABOUT CORPSE
>EXAMINE ADULT BOOKSTORE
>TASTE GUN
Given the nature of the setting, you can attempt to LICK, TASTE, or EAT more things than might usually be expected in this sort of game. You can also, crucially, ACCUSE anybody you like of the murder, which is how you end the game. Be careful, though! Guess wrong and nobody will take you seriously as a private eye ever again.
If you’d like to jump right into the game, you can find it over here. However, I really do hope you’ll take a look at a few of the other entries at least. IFComp is judged by the general public and all you have to do to be a judge is to rate a minimum of five entries: you’ve got until November 15th!
Girth Loinhammer and the Quest for the Unsee Elixir 33rd in IFComp
The 25th Interactive Fiction Competition is now over, and the results are in! Girth Loinhammer and the Quest for the Unsee Elixir came 33rd in the end, which may not be a Top Ten result but I’m still pretty happy with. There were 82 entries altogether so that’s very much in the top half of the rankings, and apparently high enough to score a small cash prize and possibly some other stuff. (IFComp is pretty generous when it comes to runners-up: if you’re on the fence about submitting something in 2020, I highly recommend giving it a go.)
The range of responses from the judges is interesting: the game attracted more votes than most (I’m guessing because people saw the title, thought “Haha what?” and clicked it), and managed to snag every possible score from one to ten. It didn’t divide opinion enough to earn me the Golden Banana of Discord (which, as you can imagine, I really really would have liked to win), but clearly there were at least a few people out there with strong feelings about it, and quite a few more who got a chuckle out of it. For something I hammered together in about a week, I think that’s a pretty good response.
I’ll be aiming to produce a slightly more ambitious version of the game in the not too distant future, which I’ll hopefully make available as an actual printed gamebook. There should also be an ebook, an online version, and probably a mobile app.
Damon L. Wakes 