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What's New In IF? Issue 21 (2024)

By Marjorie, Axelle, Noi. Brij, Dion and Bex

Now Available!

Itch.io. - Keep Reading below

If you read the zine, consider liking the post: it helps us see how many people sees it! And sharing is caring! <3

~ EDITORIAL ~

Still looking for members!

To ensure the zine has a bright future, we are still looking for free hands with a couple of hours to kill, and minds, looking to make a little difference in the community! Our team might have grown, but there is space for more kind souls!

If you too would like to help us out in a more official capacity, we have some key positions available in our roster. So shoot us a message!

This week, we had a very special guest on Small Talk... XYZZY winner, surrealist author, multimedia creator and Tumblr sensation...

Kit Riemer (@adz)!

We dove into their strange worlds, talked about their impactful games, and learned some pretty interesting stuff about making games!

Check out our interview with Kit Riemer on Small Talk...

We hope you enjoy

this new issue!

MARJORIE, AXELLE, NOI, BRIJ, DION, BEX

~ BE PART OF THE ZINE ~

WHAT'S NEW IN IF? HAS EXPANDED!

Since the release of issue #14, we've enacted some changes with the zine. It is now expanded with interviews of creators from all around the IF world, as well as direct contributions from you, our readers!

THIS ZINE ONLY HAPPENS WITH YOU!

Want to write 1-2 pages about a neat topic, or deep-dive into a game and review it in details? Share personal experiences or get all academic?

WRITE FOR THE COLUMN!

Prefer to be more low-key but still have something to share? Send us a Zine Letter or share a game title for Highlight on…!

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!

Excited as we are about next week's interview and have questions for our guest? Or want to see a certain author answer questions next? Message us!

SMALL TALK... IS WAITING!

Came across something interesting? Know a release or an update announced? Saw an event happening? Whether it's a game, an article, a podcast… Add any IF-related content to our mini-database!

EVERY LITTLE BIT COUNTS!

~ EVENT SPOTLIGHT : IFCOMP ~

The Superbowl of Interactive Fiction

The Interactive Fiction Competition (or IFComp) is one of the major yearly IF events, since 1995. It may be even the longest still-recurring yearly game making event!

Started by Kevin Wilson in the IF Usenet Forum rec.arts.int-fiction, submitted games were limited to 2h playtime before being judged and ranked by players.

Throughout the years, the IFComp evolved, seeing a couple dozens of parser entries to a wide and diverse range of IF forms. Still, after ballooning during Covid, with recurring 70+ entries, the event continues to be a key avenue for IF creation

As the submission period ended just this week, the IFComp is now moving to its Voting Period, which will last for 1-1/2 month (until October 15). Starting this Sunday, judges will be able to play and rate entries (minimum of 5 to count).

At the end of the event, if participants rank high enough, they are eligible for prizes and part of the Colossal Fund pie! @ifcomp They are still looking for donations!

Looking for great games to play? Want your voice make a difference? Go create an account and vote!

~ ENDED ~

IntroComp officially ended this week. Though there was only one courageous entry this year, congratulations to the winner! Maybe we'll see Good Bones completed within the year!

The campfire ashes of the Tales to Thrill jam have expired. But there are still 10 thrilling entries to check out!

While you can't eat them, you will find three Confiture de Parser entries to play! New and veteran parser creators spent the summer making some fun games (in French)!

As for the SuNoFes Jam, they broke all their records in submissions! Go check out some really cool entries!

The Review-a-thon also ended last week, helping add over a hundred reviews to willing games, and raising money in the process!

~ ONGOING (VOTING) ~

Voting has now started for IFComp! Until Oct 15, you can play and rate at least 5 of the 67 entries! Yup, only just 5 games to be an official judge!

~ ONGOING (SUBMITTING) ~

Only this weekend left to submit for the Bitsy Jam 83! This edition's theme is “temporary”!

The Bring Out Your Ghost jam of remembering old WIPs is coming to an end this weekend. This will be your last chance to show off your ghosts (or attempt to finish them)! @neointeractives

If you are looking to create something but can't do a whole game, the Game Mockup Jam might be for you! Returning this year, the jam is looking for 1-4 screenshots of a game that doesn't exist! @romanhyacinths

Running until Halloween, the Phantasia Jam is a three months game jam to create a fantasy narrative game, with the theme of “Hidden Magic”. It accepts both VN and IF.

On the CoG Forum, Halloween is already there! Until Oct 31st, submit to the Halloween Jam - it has funky themes!

Do you understand or write Ukrainian? Until the end of the year, the Ukrainian IF Festival is happening on itch.io!

~ OTHER ~

The Interactive Fiction Showcase is still running! If you have completed an IF piece this year, consider submitting it! It is happening only on itch!

~ SMALL TALK… ~

WITH KIT RIEMER (@adz)

~ Joining us this week is surrealist author, multimedia creator and Tumblr sensation: Kit Riemer ~ Author of “Computerfriend”, “Verses, and more! ~

Due to Tumblr's link limit, this transcription does not include any links. Download the zine on itch for the complete list.

⟶ Hello Kit! Welcome to Small Talk…

Thanks for having me!

⟶ Please, tell us a bit more about yourself and how you landed in the Interactive Fiction community.

When I was young, I was a big fan of those Choose Your Own Adventure books. The Goosebumps ones were okay, but I found a few pulp scifi ones from the '80s/'90s that were gorier and weirder, and I loved them... at my dad's recommendation, I fooled around with a few parser games like Zork in high school, but didn't realize there was an extant community for that kind of game until much later, when I published consciousness hologram. I originally wrote it as a series of HTML webpages for a hybrid poetics class I took in college, and my friend Brett convinced me to drop it into Twine and build in more interactivity. Then I found my way onto the Intfiction forum and never looked back.

⟶ Let's start with consciousness hologram, which you published in 2018, which was clearly inspired visually by early Twine games. What drove this specific formatting of the game?

It's funny you say that, cuz I wasn't really aware of other Twine games when I made it... I think it looks that way because I was just learning how to use Twine (and write basic HTML), and the styling/coding I did was extremely rudimentary and mostly based on the o.g. HTML webpage version of the story. I like the plainness of old Geocities sites and was trying to recreate that vibe, and I actually think the webpage version of the story was more visually appealing, but I quickly got addicted to the branching choice format. consciousness hologram is my most deliberately interactive game, with customizable name/pronouns and a bunch of little optional choices and branches. For future games, I had to learn to pare down...

⟶ Yet, this styling has not completely disappeared in your subsequent projects, especially in the Computerfriend series. Were those a deliberate choice?

The styling did become more deliberate in Computerfriend. That game was very carefully styled; especially the Hyperpages section, which was a reskinned version of ripped code from a Geocities forum. I spent a long time experimenting with different graphics and recreating old operating system layouts (it was originally supposed to look like Windows 95).

⟶ Is there a particular section/scene of consciousness hologram that you like the most? or one you regret?

I haven't played it in such a long time, but I have fond memories of James's integration section. His voice was a blast to write; a kind of friendly/malevolent ghost hanging around in the background of everything that happens. I'm sure if I played it now I'd cringe at most of it, but so much time has passed that it doesn't particularly feel like my game. When I (very occasionally) get comments about it, it comes as a surprise to me

⟶ Universal Hologram was your entry into IF competitions, resulting in the 23rd rank at the famed IFComp. What was your experience with the biggest IF competition? Were you stressed at all as a first time entrant?

I didn't really understand the prestige of IFComp when I joined, so I wasn't that stressed. The private author's channel was also great for relieving some of that nervousness by commiserating with everyone else. I did get a bit more self-aware as I learned about the community and received real, good, critical reviews. Not all the feedback I got was positive, but it was thoughtful and useful, and I liked that the reviewers stuck to their guns and expressed themselves clearly. During the competition, I finally started playing more IF and began to understand what was expected of a serious piece of IF.

⟶ There were a couple of years between consciousness hologram and Universal Hologram. Was there something about this game that took a while to do?

After finishing consciousness hologram, I still wasn't really involved with the IF scene, and I spent the next couple years writing a weird little novel called North Alter. While working on it, I got sick, and was spending a lot of time seeing different doctors and dealing with symptoms that made it difficult to be productive (this lasted from around 2019-2022). At one point, I listed consciousness hologram on IFDB and thought it would be funny if my friends review-bombed it so it was the lowest-rated thing on the site. I didn't realize there was a serious community there, and on my sorry-for-being-an-idiot tour I met a bunch of folks who were super smart, funny, and kind. I also got some legitimate feedback on my work, and it made me want to take another crack at Twine, so I started work on a sequel to consciousness hologram.

⟶ What is your favorite moment in Universal Hologram? What about your least favorite?

Universal Hologram is a fundamentally silly game, and most of the things I dislike about it now are related to tone. Its philosophical themes (like negative utilitarianism) have an inherent humor, at least to me, but the super casual character dialogue I wrote for it was criticized, rightfully I think, for not seeming to take itself seriously and leaning too hard on slang & swearing. The tonal shift at the end threw some players, too, but I think that's my favorite moment — whichever branch you take, I tried to make the final act of the game feel high stakes. I love the novel The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester and the paradigm shifting sequence at its end, where each earlier part is put into perspective and the reader (or at least this reader) thinks "oh damn, this is bold, he's actually doing X," so I wanted to try to pull off something similar.

⟶ Universal Hologram (and in a small section Computerfriend) includes AI-generated images. AI is currently a hot-topic in the IF-scene. What was the reaction of players regarding these images? Has your view on AI changed since?

When I was working on Universal Hologram, AI image generation tools were in a fairly early state. They were being written, trained, and published mostly by researchers and students, and it felt exciting to take advantage of them and experiment, especially in the context of a game like Universal Hologram, which deals with issues like the moral weight of an artificial intelligence. It was before the training data was poisoned by recursive AI garbage, so the result of my prompts was often inhuman, grotesque, and unique in a way I found appealing. You had to make choices like selecting the training database and setting how many iterations of an image the program would create, starting from a purplish blob and solidifying (hopefully) into something vaguely resembling the prompt. I especially enjoyed creating GIFs of the images resolving over the course of 300 or so iterations, forcing the program to gradually improve on an alien task it would never understand.

Like most people, I soured on generative AI pretty quickly. Businesses with access to massive (dubiously acquired) user data archives used them to train programs that became more and more predictable. I educated myself about the ethics and the growing environmental impact of tools like ChatGPT, but I also began seeing them used to create petabytes of SEO-optimized spam webpages and Facebook ragebait and samey & terrible stories, games, and images that began to overwhelm the small creative communities I frequented. So even though nobody ever criticized my use of AI (that I know of), I abandoned it, because today's generative AI tools seem antithetical to the things I love about art: individuality, creativity, making something out of nothing.

⟶ You didn't just participate in the IFComp, following up 6 months later with the release of Computerfriend at the SpringThing. Did you notice differences in the vibes between the two events?

Computerfriend was not meant to be a widely accessible or likable game, and I happened to finish it around the time that Spring Thing was occurring, so it seemed like a good match - I think of Spring Thing as a bit friendlier, less qualitative, & more open to odd stuff. (My favorite games that year, Manifest No and Phenomena, were both entered in the Back Garden section.) I do think Spring Thing reviews are a little less critical. Festival vs. competition.

⟶ Can you tell us a bit more about Computerfriend? And how came you up with it?

I plotted out Computerfriend while still quite sick, depressed, and isolated, and I wanted the game to reflect that isolation. I was in therapy at the time, and something that came up often was my feeling that my emotional state was actually completely normal given the circumstances — like, I had been a physically healthy & productive adult, and then I became unable to leave my house or work or see friends, and my reaction to that was, if anything, indicative of a healthy mind. And I began to imagine this character undergoing a similar existence, with personal and environmental factors that made their life hellish, and how frustrating it would be to be told that the way they felt (rather than their miserable material circumstances) was the problem. Then I researched a bunch of different therapeutic techniques to determine how they'd be used to treat someone like this.

⟶ Computerfriend won an IFDB and XYZZY Award, as well as being placed in the Top 50 IF Games of All Time. Did you expect the game to get such a following?

The response to Computerfriend was overwhelmingly positive in comparison to anything else I’ve released. I received some very kind and passionate reviews (which I go back and read occasionally when I need motivation) from intfic writers for whom I have a great deal of respect. It was a big surprise to me that folks enjoyed the game; I had written it from a very bleak & depressed perspective, but there's also some humor, and I heard from a number of players that it was a more pleasant experience than I'd expected, or really intended. Even being nominated for those awards (among brilliant authors like Autumn Chen and Jim Nelson) was hugely flattering.

⟶ Do you have a review that struck you the most?

I think a lot about Kaemi's review of Computerfriend. Kaemi writes such beautiful, intricate, strange prose, and the review is freewheeling but very specific and insightful. Sometimes I'll read a review of something I've written and it'll describe a theme or rationalize the presence of some metaphor/concept in my work, and I'll think "oh, that's why I did that." The people who closely read my stories often have better insight than I do.

⟶ Is there a scene or passage in Computerfriend that you hold dearly?

My favorite scenes in Computerfriend were when I was able to go full Gibsonian sci-fi and invent neologisms, cults, gory window dressing, stuff like that. The parts drawn from my life were not so much fun to write, but it was enjoyable mixing them with way over-the-top genre fiction details. And probably kind of therapeutic, too.

⟶ While Computerfriend was a complete entry, you did write a short sequel for it. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

After publishing Computerfriend I received some (mostly facetious) comments saying I should make a dating sim with the title character, and I thought it was a funny idea, but didn't seriously consider it until my friends in the Neointeractives group threw Smoochie Jam. I'd been plugging away at Verses for a couple years and I needed a break, so I dumped the Computerfriend stylesheet into a new file and wrote Familiar over the course of a few days. Although it was initially kind of a joke, I ended up writing it in a more serious voice. It's a very short, inessential game, a little postface for players who didn't get the closure they needed from Computerfriend.

⟶ What did you enjoy the most while writing Familiar?

I like Godfield, and returning for a little while was nice. When I work on a single project for too long, I enter its world completely, and it’s isolating to throw days, weeks, months, even years of energy into this void that no one else can see. Then, when I publish, the fugue ends so abruptly that by the time the work receives attention and comments, I’m somewhere else entirely. Familiar was less a creative exercise and more a check-in with an older version of myself - how bleak is this place, really? Can anything of value be found there? It didn’t get a lot of attention, but I enjoyed working on it.

⟶ From a more dystopian sci-fi setting, you moved towards bi-lingual works, starting with piele. What was the reason behind this form of translating interactivity?

piele is a prototype for the translation mechanic in Verses (which I just published as part of IFComp). I wanted to build a natural-feeling system to understand both literal and metaphorical/contextual meaning in poetic translation, and piele was my first attempt. I normally wouldn't have published it, but the Neo-Twiny Jam (also from the Neointeractives) was running at the time, and I wanted to show people this little toy I'd made.

⟶ Was there a particular reason for using Romanian as the translated language?

I have Romanian ancestors, and the poetry translation was an exercise to build better cultural knowledge of their place of origin. I don’t speak Romanian, nor do any of my living family members, so it required a lot of consultation with various resources and, ultimately, a lot of assumptions and guesswork. The result is probably not close to the original meaning, but can a translation ever be completely accurate?

⟶ Is there a specific Romanian sentence/saying you discovered through this research that stuck with you?

Romanian is a fascinating language, especially for someone like me who has a rudimentary understanding of some Latin roots - it's a Romance language, of course, so it shares quite a bit with languages like Spanish and Italian, but many of its words also come from other Indo-European sources like Slavic or Dacian. I don't speak it, but I still recognize quite a bit - for example, "blood" in Romanian is "sânge," which I recognized because of the Spanish word “sangre.” The translation process was often frustrating but also filled with moments like this where something suddenly and intuitively made sense. And funny moments, too: lots of old Dacian words described swamps, which makes sense if you look at the geography of the area where the language originated.

A phrase I liked from a book of Romanian folktales: instead of "and they lived happier ever after," the final sentence reads " If they haven't died, they are living still."

⟶ From the short piele concept, you followed up with your IFComp entry Verses. Can you tell us a bit more about it?

Verses has been my project for the last three or so years (I was plotting it out long before publishing Computerfriend, in fact). It's hard to describe, but in short, you play as someone who analyzes objects and phrases to try to determine truth. It's set in Romania in the village where my grandmother grew up, and I've included sections where you translate actual poetry from Romanian, although these sections of the game are mostly optional.

⟶ Were these projects, piele and Verses created as a way to (re)connect to that ancestry?

piele was just a proof of concept, but Verses is in part an attempt to better understand my family's history. My Romanian grandparents died when I was young, and my life is full of their anecdotes and phrases, but I know there's so much I missed, too. Most of what I read about Romanian history while working on Verses was totally new to me. The country's history is politically fraught, and getting a straight story about (e.g.) the Soviet occupation and Romanian holocaust during World War II is very difficult.

⟶ Verses is your second time entering the IFComp. How do you feel about it? Have there been lessons you took from entering Universal Hologram that you applied to Verses?

I like the seriousness of IFComp. Most of the participants (authors, players, reviewers) have higher standards than they would for something like a game jam. That said, no matter how technically proficient you are, not everyone will like what you do. Don't try to please everyone. Your game should work, it should be bug-free, it should be polished, you should be proud of it. But you shouldn't aim for universal acclaim. "Likable" is not a compelling trait for a work of art. Something that appeals strongly to a smaller group, something that upends expectations, even being described as "polarizing" is good.

⟶ What kind of feeling/message do you hope players will take after player Verses?

There's a lot going on in the game, and since its release a few days ago I've seen some discussion around different themes players noticed. I agree with Nabokov when he talks about his distaste for "moral stories;" I want my work to be open ended and provoke questions rather than having a single clear point or argument (if that were the case, I'd write an essay). That said, Verses is a story that's hugely concerned with morality and complicity. I want players to consider their distance from acts committed by their ancestors in the name of the future, and from extant atrocities like the current genocide in Palestine. A gun fires and a living person dies. Then, a thousand miles away, a story is told, a history is written, and not only the death but the life is erased.

⟶ Just before the release of Computerfriend you released Let Me Tell You Who You Are, as an homage to uquiz. How did you manage balancing making this game and your entry to the Spring Thing?

Let Me Tell You Who You Are was a super quick project; I thought it up and wrote the whole thing within a day or two. Uquiz is endlessly funny to me. The limited cultural reach of the quizzes is kind of a joke to people on Tumblr, where the entirety of human experience sits on a spectrum somewhere between Taylor Swift and Hozier, and I thought it would be a good bit to have one of these cheerfully myopic questionnaires that occasionally dips into horror and antiquated verse.

⟶ I am the Mom Friend (too fitting for me...). How did you define each result of the quiz?

The reason I was able to get the quiz done so quickly is that there's actually very little variety... in fact, if I remember correctly, everyone is the Mom Friend :)

⟶ Is there a genre or theme you'd like to explore in future projects?

After Verses, I don’t know what I’ll do. Maybe I’ll record an album. I do have a couple ideas for stories in a more surreal, less sci-fi mode, but I don’t know if they’ll end up as games or something else.

⟶ Your work is universally based on Twine, particularly the Harlowe format. What about it attracted you?

Twine is extremely simple, based stylistically on CSS and HTML (I had some familiarity with these already), and most importantly free. Free to use and free to publish under whatever license you choose. I've tried to learn programs with more use cases (and honestly saleability) like Godot, but I have no background in actual programmatic coding, so I found it too difficult. I might try again at some point, but right now I want to create and publish (not learn new tools) with what little money and time I have. What I love about Twine is that a single person can learn enough in a few days or weeks and make something remarkable without having a wide set of skills (besides writing). And if you do have other skills, like audio engineering or digital art, you can apply them very easily.

⟶ Is there a thing you wished you had known about Twine or IF in general before starting making games?

Learning the conventions of your genre (so you can adhere to or subvert them) by playing can be useful, but there’s nothing you need to know before making a game. Just make something, evaluate, and then make something better.

⟶ You don't just create games, you are a multimedia creator (writing fiction and doing photography). What about those mediums interest you?

Every medium is more or less the same to me in terms of the scope of potential accomplishment (does that sentence make any sense?). I collect ideas and metaphors and themes, and they gradually cohere into a project that fits better into some mediums than others. The more things you know how to do, the more options you have to explore and combine these interests. Film photography does have a special place in my heart, though. There’s something very mystical about it.

I used my (heavily edited) photos in North Alter, and I'd like to do something similar again. I've been focused on text for a while now, and I'm starting to miss the more collage-y stuff I used to do...

⟶ Your photography and stories have also been published. Is there a publication you are particularly proud of?

I'm not especially proud of anything I've made being published/shared widely. I think about Ocean Vuong's interview with The Creative Independent where he talks about awards and competitions: "If you must use that construct, you use it the way one uses public transport. Get on, then get off at your stop and find your people." The attention is a means to an end for me.

⟶ Your work is often centered around the surreal, weirdness, and mysticism. What influences contributed to this?

Life is full of moments of surrealty or unreality. I mistake my dreams for reality all the time, and vice versa. I try to be careful and methodical and thorough when I work, but I don't know anything, and I don't like guessing. I'm comfortable not knowing. And then at the same time, I'm fascinated by people who do have answers. That's something that feels truly surreal to me: positioning yourself as someone with a serious understanding of life's complexity. I like to try to get into these peoples' heads.

I was raised in a conservative religious home. As a child, beginning to pick holes in what's supposed to be the absolute nature of the universe is frightening. It feels like the ground's falling out from under you. I've had to make peace with this, too. I love my parents very much, and I think I understand them pretty well, but there will always be things they believe that I find mystical and strange. It's a life-long process for me to learn as much as I can and, simultaneously, to accept that most things will remain a mystery.

⟶ Are there works that inspire you to create?

Right now, I'm inspired by Kate Zambreno's and Han Kang's books, Marc Horowitz' painting Old traps disappear and new ones emerge, Ville Kallio's game Cruelty Squad, and the album "Grieftopia" by Ministry of Interior Spaces.

⟶ Do you have any IF recommendations for our readers?

Here are some IF games that are worth playing:

The Archivist and The Revolution by Autumn Chen

Repeat the Ending by Drew Cook

the shape you make when you want your bones to be closest to the surface by Porpentine Charity Heartscape

Victim Doll by communistsister (mind the CWs)

Photopia by Adam Cadre

Manifest No by Kaemi Velatet

⟶ You hold multiple usernames over the internet. What's the story behind adz and slugzuki?

I’ve had my Tumblr account for over a decade & was there many years ago when the site deleted a ton of unused blogs - I was obsessed with the album “The Age of Adz” by Sufjan Stevens at the time, so I snatched up the URL :)

“Slugzuki” doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just a username I came up with that’s typically available on every website.

⟶ How do you cope with seeing your posts blow up on Tumblr? And then appear on Twitter/Reddit?

Haha, it's never the posts I expect (or want) that blow up. My friends like sending me screenshots from Instagram or wherever someone's reposted me. It's just the nature of the internet; I'm at peace with it.

⟶ Since you just released something, we won't ask you to divulge what next secret project is in the works. But where can we follow your progress and/or releases?

If you want to keep track of what I release, you can follow me on Tumblr (@adz) or sign up for my email list here: https://buttondown.com/slugzuki.

Now, go play some IFComp (@ifcomp) games and write reviews or comments if the spirit moves you! The authors will be grateful :)

Huge thanks to Kit Riemer for Letting us send so many questions this week and telling us so much… and more!

~ NEW RELEASE ~

No notable new independent release.

As always, don't forget to check out the submitted entries to the events mentioned in the previous pages. They deserve some love too!

~ NEW RELEASE (WIP) ~

Love and Leases (Twine) is a slice-of-life project where you play as a newly single person, trying to get their life back together. @loveandleases

The Ancient Tombs of Time (CScript) is a fantasy project, in which you play as god, sealed away for decades until recently freed. @theancienttombsoftime

The FANTASTIC Clash (CScript) is a modern drama project, where you play as a contestant on a reality TV show.

Immortal (Twine) is a supernatural project, following you as a private investigator, plagued by mysterious dreams. @immortal-if

~ UPDATES ~

After Dark (CScript) updated the Patreon demo with extra content.

Dragon Kin (CScript) added Chapter 5 to the demo.

Drink your Villian Juice! (CScript) Chapter 7 Part 1 is now available to all. @drinkyourvillainjuice

Football Glory (CScript) completed Prologue and Chapter 1 rewrite.

Era of the Archdemons (CScript) added half of Chapter 3.

Grey Swan - Birds of a Rose (CScript) started rewriting the demo, now new and updated. @reinekes-fox

Legend of the Dragoon (CScript) added part of Chapter 1 to the demo.

Sense and Sorcery (CScript) updated the demo with extra content.

The One Chosen (CScript) added new chapter to the Patreon demo. @parrotwatcher

The People's House (CScript)'s complete demo in now live for public beta.

Jolly Good: Tea and Scones (CScript) added a new path to Chapter 7.

Crown of Ashes and Flames (Twine) made Chapter 4 available for all. @coeluvr

Crown of Exile (Twine) updated the Patreon demo with a new chapter. @ramonag-if

Of Crowns and Echoes (Twine) added Chapter 2 to the demo. @of-crowns-and-echoes

Valiant (Twine) completed a major re-write of the demo and routes. @valiant-if

Path of Martial Arts (CScript) updated Patreon demo with extra content. @nicky-if

Specters of the Deep (CScript) added Chapter 7 to demo.

Weeping Gods (CScript) added new content and for the noble origin path. @jcollinswrites

Virtue’s End (CScript) updated the Patreon demo. @virtues-end

Club Oblivion (Twine) completed Malygos’s route. @ramonag-if

The Good People (Na Doine Maithe) (Ren’Py) updated the demo with new sprites. @moiraimyths

Scarlet Sorceress (CScript) released a side chapter called “The Mystery of Castle Alaire’.

Surge, Spire, and Sea (CScript) is the new title of Gigantea: Age of Rot, and added two new chapters.

Bridging the gap (CScript) added extra content to the demo. @astralfortune

Our Life: Now & Forever (Ren’Py) updated the Patreon Beta build. @gb-patch

Fields of Asphodel (CScript) has been officially released under Hosted Game and is available for purchase on Steam and other platforms. @chrysanthemumgames

Dragon of Steelthorne (CScript) has added two chapters to the released game, giving a 40% discount for new players.

~ OTHER ~

Fate Unwritten (Twine) is looking for beta-testers for the upcoming update. @fateunwritten-if

When Twilight Strikes (Twine) is looking for beta-testers for the upcoming chapter. @evertidings

Magehunter: Phoenix Flame (CScript) is looking for official beat-testers for their final version of the game.

The new issue of the Amare Fortnightly Bulletin is out! Check it out here! @amaregames

Also released this week was the new issue of the Indiepocalypse, which includes a couple of IF games! Get it here! @pizzapranks

Polygon interviewed Julia Minamata, author of The Crimson Diamond, a retro parser recently released on Steam.

Brian Rushton (@mathbrush) released his book about a slice of IF History. You can download it for free here.

As always, we apologize in advance for missing any update or release from the past week. We are only volunteers using their limited free time to find as much as we can - but sometimes things pass through the cracks.

If you think something should have been included in this week's zine but did not appear, please shoot us a message! We'll do our best to add it next week! And if you know oncoming news, add it here!

~ MAYBE YOU NEXT? ~

We did not get a submission this week. But if you have an idea for a short essay, or would like a special space to share your thoughts about IF and the community...

Shoot us an email!

~ HIGHLIGHT ON ~

A couple of games that we thought were cool.

Your favourite game here?

Do you have a favourite game that deserves some highlighting?

An old or recent game that wowed you so much you spam it to everyone?

Tell us about it! And it might appear here!

WE LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU ALL! WHETHER IT'S GOOD OR BAD, OR EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN...

That was an amazing interview, with Jacqueline. I knew the IF community had been here for a while, but I didn't understand until now how long it was... And those answers! Is it weird I wished you has asked more questions? - anon

Have something to say? Send us a message titled: Zine Letter!

As we end this issue, we would like to thank:

the very cool and very helpful anonymous users!

For sending news, interview questions, helpful tips, cool links, filled form, written Sheet line, even emails... all these help us so much to make this Zine possible!

And as always, huge thanks to all you readers who liked, shared, and commented on last week's issue! What might be tiny actions are huge support and motivators to us! Thank you for cheering us on this journey!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

While we usually announce our next interviewee in this section, this won't be the case this week. We'll actually be taking a short breaks from our interview series. Don't worry! It will come back in a few issues!

In the meantime, go cheer your favorite author for us!

And see you again next week!

MARJORIE, AXELLE, NOI, BRIJ, DION, BEX

WHAT'S NEW IN IF? 2024-ISSUE 21

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