Monthly Archives: March 2010

End of March Vespers Update (or, How To Drop A Girl)

By Rubes | Published: March 31, 2010

March comes, March goes. Lion, lamb, all the usual stuff.

March is always a busy month, what with GDC and sundry work-related conferences and travels. And this year, of course, there was PAX East. Man, how I wanted to be there for that. It was, by still rare accounts, an amazing show of force by the IF community, and from what I can tell a great time was had by all. It sounds like there was a groundswell of new or renewed interest in IF, which can only be a Good Thing. And, of course, GET LAMP. I can’t help but feel like I missed a significant event in IF and the opportunity to meet some great folks, but at the same time I am excited that it occurred and grateful that there are those who could make something like that happen.

Making things happen is a good [More...]

Posted in 3D/if, Vespers, interactive fiction | 5 Comments

iPad Games They’d Love To See

By Rubes | Published: March 26, 2010

Spotted on CrunchGear.com:

From the web site:

“Planetfall – One of the original Infocom classics. Listen: the iPad has a usable keyboard and can support external keyboards. Why not slap together an Infocom pack for $2 and sell some imagination to these whippersnappers. Who’s with me?”

Not bad, at least it’s good to see some people interested in seeing classic IF on the new device. Of course, it would have made sense to mention the fact that IF already exists on the iPhone platform (see iPhone Frotz) with an inexhaustable supply of excellent pieces, but I’m okay with that.

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Posted in interactive fiction | 5 Comments

Long Flights Are Good For Something

By Rubes | Published: March 22, 2010

One thing long flights are good for is addressing old issues that you’ve always meant to fix but never really got around to. So when I found myself on a three-and-a-half hour flight yesterday, I decided it was time to tackle an old parser syntax issue that has been nagging at me for some time.

My goal with the parser has always been to make it as robust as possible, even if much of the functionality isn’t necessarily used in Vespers — I’d hate to have to add functionality after the fact, like for a future game. So the idea was to develop the parser to provide at least the typical performance one might expect from a TADS or Inform game. Most of the early months of development were spent on engineering the parser, and it was quite the battle. Hard to say for sure, but I’d say I got [More...]

Posted in Vespers, interactive fiction, text in games | 1 Comment

Sweet, Sweet Posters

By Rubes | Published: March 3, 2010

Every once in a while you come across something that reminds you how awesome the intertubes can be. Zazzle is one of those things.

Sure, more people probably know about Cafepress, and this sort of thing has been around for a while already. Making a custom T-shirt or mug with your own artwork is no revelation, for sure. But over the years it has developed into a pretty slick process, and it’s pretty cool how easy and fast it is to whip up a prototype of something, order it, and have it delivered to your door. The process has basically become how people imagined it should be. Pick the item you want, upload your artwork, fiddle around with it until it’s just right, and order that sucker right up. And the fact that these places allow you to order even a single copy of your item, [More...]

Posted in Vespers | 9 Comments