Devs explore what did and didn't work in their text-driven IF Comp games

Devs behind a number of this year’s Interactive Fiction Competition (IF Comp) entries have written up postmortems of their text-driven games, offering other developers insight into the reasoning behind certain choices in those games and how well those decisions translated to each final project. 

Writer and narrative designer Emily Short has shared a semi-annotated roundup containing many of this year’s published postmortems over on her blog, breaking the gathering of links up into sections according to the theme of each postmortem.

Reflections on topics like presentation, user experience, creative process, narrative structure, puzzles, and more are accounted for in the roundup, with 20 games (including 2018 IF Comp winner Alias ‘The Magpie’ and runner-up Bogeyman) featured in the post.

This year’s IF Comp marks the 24th run of the competition and, as with past years, aims to promote interactive fiction where the bulk of player interactions involve text through formats like parser IF, choice-based IF, and hypertext IF. A look at those definitions and how they’ve evolved can be found on the IF Comp’s website, along with a list of winners from both this year's and past competitions.