IF in Yuletide 2017

[prosodiical]

I'm posting this since the usual people haven't! This is copy-pasted from the excellent posts last year and the year before (2016, 2015). Any new errors are mine.

raininshadows has also made a spreadsheet of requests!

Are you interested in text adventures, CYOA, twine games or other sorts of interactive fiction? Do you want to let your writer know you'd be happy to receive something along those lines? Are you looking for someone to write IF for? This post is for you.

What is IF?
Interactive Fiction (IF) covers everything from text adventures through to visual novels, by way of all sorts of experimental works. It can be mostly a game, or mostly a story; it can be a way to immerse the reader, or to play around with the concepts of storyteller and audience; it can be an exploration of chance, or of fate; it can be a straightforward story, or something else entirely. From Healy's post:

[IF] is a term used for games which are made up primarily of text, like Adventure, Zork, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and other text adventures, or more experimental hypertext works like My Father's Long, Long Legs, or even visual novels. Interactive fiction these days is generally divided into two groups based on how you interact with the game: parser-based IF, and choice-based IF.

Parser-based IF, more commonly known as text adventures, are controlled by typed in commands, like "GET KEY", "OPEN DOOR", "GO NORTH", "LOOK UNDER BED", and stuff like that. Not every command you type in will work, though, so they're hard to get used to if you haven't tried them before. To make things easier, here's a card of most of the common commands. Some good parser-based IF to try first would be Ryan Veeder's So, You've Never Played a Text Adventure Before, Huh?, Admiral Jota's Lost Pig, Andrew Plotkin's The Dreamhold, and Adam Cadre's Photopia.

Choice-based IF is simpler; you just pick from a number of options. This can be done through hyperlinks and other clicky selections, though more rarely you may have to type a number from a list. Good examples of choice-based IF include Anna Anthropy's Star Court, Alan DeNiro's Solarium, the various games hosted by Choice of Games, and most every given visual novel.

Writing IF for Yuletide
IF is considered opt-in for Yuletide - please don't write it for people who don't want it. If you aren't sure whether it would be welcome or not, ask a mod to check with the intended recipient.

You are still required to follow the normal rules, such as focusing on requested characters (unless the recipient has said you needn't include them all).

If you're writing a treat, unless you're sure your recipient would be happy with it as a main gift, either post it to Madness or wait till they have another full-length gift posted.

It can be hard to figure out what word count an IF story really is - what you've written is full of code that doesn't count, and what your recipient sees may vary in length depending on their choices. If you're posting to the main collection, try to overshoot the minimum requirement a bit, just to be on the safe side. Say a minimum of somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 words. Or probably about 10 to 15 minutes play through.

If your post to the main AO3 collection is under 1,000 words (e.g. you're just linking to an online playable version elsewhere), please drop the mods a note so they know it isn't someone posting something under the minimum, and provide them with an estimated word-count.

Your recipient does need to be able to access what you've created! Please link to a suitable IF interpreter if required, or if possible make a web-playable version.


Requesting IF for Yuletide
If you would be happy to receive IF this year, please leave a comment below, following this template:

AO3 username:
Letter link:
Fandoms you would like IF for:
Anything else: (optional - the sort of things you love about IF, specific IF prompts and preferences etc)


Some IF Tools
This is from Healy's and quillori's lists from previous years. A * means they can make web-based games.

Parser-based
Inform*: One of the biggest development tools for making parser-based IF. Has an English-like code. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Quest*: Another big IF development tool. Has a click-and-point editor with the option to check out the code. For Windows and web.
TADS*: A long running engine for writing interactive fiction, though generally not as easy to use as Inform. The latest version can make web-based games, although they need to be hosted on a non-https address or on the IFDB.

Choice-based
Twine*: Very popular tool for making choice-based IF. Has a visual editor, with some code-y bits for variables and the like. Can be extended with some Javascript passages. Available for Mac and Windows, and Twine 2 is web-based. See this comment for more notes.
ChoiceScript*: Used by the fine folks over at Choice of Games. Uses simplified Javascript to make games. It's very stat heavy. Requires a text editor. See this comment for notes.
Ren'py: Engine for making visual novels. Uses a simple scripting language. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and can make games for all those platforms.
Inklewriter*: A completely web-based engine for making CYOA-style games.

Comments

[quillori]

AO3 username: Quillori
Letter link: DW Letter
Fandoms you would like IF for:
Le città invisibili | Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
Táng Cháo | Tang Dynasty RPF
Omar Rayyan - Works
Liáo zhâi zhì yì | Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio - Pú Sônglíng

Anything else: I find IF fascinating, so I'm pretty much guaranteed to love whatever you do - if you want to do something I don't mention, the very fact I didn't think of it means I'll be interested to read it. So these prompts are only suggestions, not in any way requirements.

I have far more experience with choice based than parser based games, but I'm open to either. I'm all mac though, so web based or works on a mac, please.

For Invisible Cities, I would have thought Euphemia, with its trade in memories, offers some fascinating IF possibilities - for example, normally in-game choices affect what happens in the future; how would it work if they reflect what you remember of the past? Or a story pieced together from many fragments of memories. Or something else entirely!

Berenice's intrigue and intricately nested stories offers a different type of inspiration, with its informers and hidden communities.

Tang Dynasty RPF: It's the imagery here I'm interested in, and I'm not sure how that would translate to a traditional IF story, but perhaps after all it would be possible to use IF to create the sort of phantasmagorical world I'm interested in, where the reality of demons and ghosts and spirits always underlies the 'real' world of humans.

Worldbuilding for Spanish Mackerel (Omar Rayyan) would be very welcome, in whatever form you want.

Very much the same elements appear again and again in Strange Tales - the scholars and the monks and the beautiful women, the ghosts and the foxes and the demons - but the outcomes and the characters of the participants changes radically from story to story.

(I haven't included The Reluctant Widow - Georgette Heyer and Kitaab 'alf layla wa-layla | One Thousand and One Nights in the list of fandoms I'd like IF for, because my fairly character focussed requests this year (for Francis Cheviot and Ja'far respectively) seem to me more suited for a more conventional, non-IF story, but if I'm wrong about that, and you see the perfect way to write one of those requests as IF, go ahead.)