Lucian's Interactive Fiction Page

IF stuff involving your host.

• Web Projects:

  • The IF Beta Site was set up by Liza Daly and I to help IF authors find beta-testers for their work. Originally for IF Competition games, it's now also available for general use.

  • The IF Bookclub is an experiment to try to increase awareness and discussion of older, larger works of IF. There are also some local files on this site, mostly containing archived discussion of past and present bookclub selections.

• Games:

  [Note: All the games below are played using an interpreter. Kind of like how a Word document isn't much good on its own, but needs to be viewed in Word. If you have Win95, I recommend WinFrotz, but many other interpreters exist for other platforms.)
  • The Edifice, (release 2) WINNER of the Third Annual IF Contest, and receiver of 'Best Puzzle' and 'Best Puzzles' from the 1997 XYZZY Awards.
    You can read some comments and reviews of 'The Edifice', some glowing, some positive, and some negative. ('The Edifice' was one of seven games in the competition to receive at least one of all possible votes from 1-10)

  • I also wrote Comp97.z5, which was used as the Competition 'front end' that year, and Comp98.z5, which was used the next year.

  • The Chicken Under The Window was written for Adam Cadre's Chicken Comp. I've also made the source code for it available.

  • Continuing the tradition of quickly-written games, I wrote Three Steps to the Left for SpeedIF 3. (As implied in the title of this competition, this whole game was written in about two hours.)

  • Most recently, I've been involved in an exciting new project with Coca-Cola. Download CokeIsIt today!

• Me talking about stuff:

  • I was interviewed by Luca Melchionna for his Italian IF page about Edifice and IF in general. The interview should eventually be up here in both English and Italian.

  • As part of Stephen Granade's Review Project I received a copy of Zork: Grand Inquisitor and wrote a review of it.

  • I've HTML-ized my reviews of the 1998 IF Competition games. There were many wonderful, wonderful games. Get them yourself at http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition98/

  • I also wrote reviews of the 1996 IF Competition games. I seem to be getting more wordy in my old age, so if you've already suffered through the '98 ones, this won't take as long. (I didn't review the '97 ones, since I entered that year.)

  • I wrote a couple articles for Issue 16 of XYZZYnews: 'Parlez-Vous Nalian?' about how I implemented Stranger's language in 'The Edifice', and a report on the March 13th IGDN conference in Austin.
    [Note: the nalian.inf module mentioned in the first article is in the inform6/library/contributions/ directory, not the /inform6/examples/ directory as mentioned in the original article.]

  • Here's a transcript of a conversation I started one evening on ifMUD about replayability in adventure games, as well as my summary of that conversation.

  • In April '98, I was interviewed on the ifMUD. You can read the transcript here.

  • Another interview with me about 'The Edifice' can be found in Issue 13 of SPAG, along with some reviews of the game (some the same as are on my edifice page.)

  • I've been involved with discussions on IF theory and practice on the IF Patterns Pages, which attempt to consolidate the wisdom of IF programmers into an easily-graspable format called a 'pattern'. You can also visit my own page over there, if you want.

• Miscellany

  • I've started keeping some of my transcripts on-line. Mostly of use to the authors of said games, they might make for vaguely interesting reading to others, as well. Or as examples, and stuff.

  • And, speaking of transcripts, here are some transcripts of some on-line roleplaying sessions. They don't really have much to do with IF other than the fact that most of the people playing them know each other because of it. And the fact that GMing has remarkable overlap with writing IF. Many of these are 7th Sea games, though not all.

  • The mini-competition I sponsored didn't get a lot of entrants (partly due to Adam Cadre's Chicken-Comp, which probably had a better premise, but there you go), but there were a few, and they definitely deserve recognition. Thanks, guys!

  • Finally, I've written some Invisiclues for Andrew Plotkin's excellent game, So Far. (SoFar.z8 in that directory)

IF stuff in general.

• The Third one is over, but check here for the latest Annual Interactive Fiction Competition.
• No IF link list would be complete without mentioning the wonderful Interactive Fiction Archive
• A good place to branch out and find other links is Stephen Granade's Brass Lantern page (the resurrected about.com site)
• Another good place to start is Stephen van Egmond's Twisty Pages. You can get from there to an archive of...
• rec.arts.int-fiction This and its sister group, rec.games.int-fiction are two newsgroups dedicated to writing and playing (respectively) IF.
• XYZZYnews is the excellent web-zine that got me back into IF in '97.
• SPAG, the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games, is another good 'zine, mostly containing reviews of many different and disparate works of IF.