tabitha-writes

[tabitha-writes]

New IF release feat. Zach and Lyle from last year's "Blood and Company"!

It’s New Year’s Eve, and you’re not alone.

Play as vampire Zach dating human grad student Lyle, who has a request for you tonight—stay over... and face the sunlight tomorrow.

5,500+ words total

Angsty or sweet? Comedic or pathetic? You decide!

Multiple possible endings

[tabitha-writes]

New IF release feat. Zach and Lyle from last year's "Blood and Company"!

It’s New Year’s Eve, and you’re not alone.

Play as vampire Zach dating human grad student Lyle, who has a request for you tonight—stay over... and face the sunlight tomorrow.

5,500+ words total

Angsty or sweet? Comedic or pathetic? You decide!

Multiple possible endings

[tabitha-writes]

Announcing the second Queer Vampire IF Jam!

This is a month-long game jam that will run from January 10 - February 20th, 2025. The goal of this jam is to create more interactive fiction games about queer vampires, focusing both on queer relationships and queer experiences as told through a vampiric narrative.

Check out the entries from last year here!

JAM RULES:

Your project must focus on queer characters and vampires. Queer relationships, romantic or platonic, as well as other queer experiences, whether gay, lesbian, bisexual, ace, aro, trans and nonbinary - this is an inclusive jam. 

You can write from a human or vampire perspective (or both!)

This jam will accept any medium, so long as the work is an Interactive Fiction.

This jam will accept adult content as well as games covering heavy & uncomfortable topics, but please be sure to properly list trigger warnings either in-game or on the game page.

Entries that promote any kind of bigotry will not be accepted.

Games should not include any AI generated content.

You can submit as many entries as you'd like.

There is no language requirement; we will accept games in any language.

You are allowed to start working on your project early! That's why I'm announcing it now. This jam is unranked and it's not a contest, this is just for fun.

Submissions open midnight, January 10th EST. They'll close February 20th at 11:59pm EST.

Join the jam here!

hosted by me and @nyehilismwriting

Additional questions we got asked frequently last year, for clarification:

Do Visual Novels count?

Yes!

What is Interactive Fiction?

Personally, I find interactive fiction hard to define, and I’m not interested in policing it, so as long as it’s recognizably interactive fiction - ie, the game has a narrative focus primarily with text, and the player can interact (whether that be with direct choices, clicking through links, or allowing the player to choose how to move around and interact with the world/the game like in bitsy) then it counts. Parsers, visual novels, choose-your-own-adventures are some of the popular examples of IF, but there are plenty that don’t fall within any category. Check out the IF tag on itch.io and you can see just how varied it is.

Does it have to be horror?

No, any genre is accepted!

[tabitha-writes]

New IF release feat. Zach and Lyle from last year's "Blood and Company"!

It’s New Year’s Eve, and you’re not alone.

Play as vampire Zach dating human grad student Lyle, who has a request for you tonight—stay over... and face the sunlight tomorrow.

5,500+ words total

Angsty or sweet? Comedic or pathetic? You decide!

Multiple possible endings

[tabitha-writes]

IF Discords?

Hello Tumblr, I'm seeking recs for Discord servers for writers and players of IF! I know of several already, but they're not quite filling the niche I'm looking for. I write short, self-contained, mostly queer IF and would like to connect with others doing the same. I want a place to chat with other people about my projects as I work on them, and hear from others as they work on theirs; I want to play other people's finished works and discuss them, and have people do the same for mine. Are there any spaces out there like this that are open to new members, or would anyone be interested in joining if I made one?

[tabitha-writes]

Come play, rate, and nominate short interactive fiction games for the Short Games Showcase! 94 games, all with a playtime of ~30 minutes or less (many significantly less, e.g. under 5 minutes).

[tabitha-writes]

've been saying I'd write about playtesting when I got to the end of my current Let's Make IF thing. And so I have (part 1 of 2)

[tabitha-writes]

Latest game! Made for Ectocomp 2024, the IF community's annual horror/spooky/Halloween competition.

[tabitha-writes]

Latest game! Made for Ectocomp 2024, the IF community's annual horror/spooky/Halloween competition.

[tabitha-writes]

Did you know? Ectocomp games are now live! Play and rate spooky games all November from Petite Mort (4 hour speed IF) and Grand Guignol (longer works) categories. A high point of my IF year, every year!

[tabitha-writes]

you can write protagonists who are bad people and have biases they need to work through. that's a good thing to explore in fiction! but it's a completely separate issue from how you as the author choose to populate your world. if your story's only fat character is the evil villain while your protag's white knight is skinny and hot, you better believe i'm going to call that out

[tabitha-writes]

you can write protagonists who are bad people and have biases they need to work through. that's a good thing to explore in fiction! but it's a completely separate issue from how you as the author choose to populate your world. if your story's only fat character is the evil villain while your protag's white knight is skinny and hot, you better believe i'm going to call that out

[tabitha-writes]

ECTOCOMP is here! It's one of my favorite annual IF events, along with Spring Thing.

It's horror-themed (from silly to scary), with two events. Very open re: systems, etc. Consider making something!

There is a speed category that allows four hours for writing and another for longer works.

[tabitha-writes]

Welcome to the 30th Annual IFComp!

2024 IFComp Logo, by Lauren Davies

We’re glad you’re here. If this is your first time joining us, welcome! If you’re already familiar with us, welcome back! Either way, we hope you have a great time and enjoy exploring some of the over seventy new games we have for you this year.

What's next? 

Check out the games, now live at ifcomp.org 

You have until October 15, 2023 at 11:59pm Eastern to vote. 

You only have to play & rate 5 games to be a judge! (Yep, just five!)

We would love to expand the number of judges! You can help!

Talk about the competition on social media, and encourage others to check out all these new games. Consider playing with a friend or family member who is new to interactive fiction, talk about the games together, and encourage them to vote as well. Thanks! 

We will do a post-competition survey to capture your ideas for improving the competition in the future, so if you have thoughts about improvements, please watch for the survey in October.

Any questions?

Email us at ifcomp@ifcomp.org Thank you in advance for judging!

—Jacqueline Ashwell, October 2024

[tabitha-writes]

I contributed to a fun IF snack by multiple authors!

[tabitha-writes]

Next Week: Interview with Drew Cook

As announced in our last issue (go read it!), we will be interviewing...

DREW COOK (@golmac)

Award-winning creator of Repeat the Ending, retro-IF enthusiast and creator of the Gold Machine, parser craft writer with Top Expert.

Send us any question you'd have for Drew!

Whether it's general or ultra specific, tell us what you'd like to know!

[tabitha-writes]

My final work of IF for the @neo-twiny-jam!

A purely kinetic (i.e., no choices), 500-word trans Bluebeard story with a happy ending.  Thanks to manonamora for the conversation that inspired the idea, and to Autumn Chen for making the joke that inspired the tagline! Further inspiration came from reading up on the Bluebeard story and finding no explanation as to why the guy's beard is blue OR why that was considered so ugly.