meeting thoughts etc

[Ed Blair]

1) the TMBG thing was awesome, and I'm really stoked that almost all of us had a piece in it.  I'd like to keep that sort of momentum going, but maybe narrow the focus to just us, or other chicago based IF authors.  i threw out an idea in my last e-mail about trading ideas for small games, but if someone has a catchier theme, i'm down.  

2) i think i'm going to start teaching myself Twine, the hypertext engine.  i've got glimmerings of new project ideas and twine seems like it might better serve them.  so... if people have questions or want to discuss twine and hypertext things, i guess i'm adding it to my wheelhouse.  

3) 826Chi workshop.  I'm TAing a workshop with them now, and I think an IF-based thing could be really good there.  I'm going to try to get a copy of the proposal worksheet, but the one i'm doing is three sessions, and that seems to be the max with most of their seasonal workshops.  I think we'd do best creating games by committee with the kids, portioning up the writing/coding.  I've got more on this topic to discuss, but in person might work best.

4) Dave, what happened with your comp? did you get submissions?  how is that going?

5) Did anyone come up with thoughts for our IF ARG?  I had vague ideas of tying it around riots and political unrest, but maybe that's too charged?  

6) I think I've convinced a NEW person to come to the next meeting.  he's a young 'un, and hasn't had a huge IF background, but he's teaching himself inform right now, so... yeah.

thoughts?

ed.

[Chris McAvoy]

Hi All,

I've been lurking on the list for a bit.  I'm new to IF, and have only built a single short short short game (source here).  I won't be able to make any Thursday night meetings until my wife is done with a class she's taking.  It ends in June, so I'm hoping to come out this summer.

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 3:12 PM, Ed Blair <dead...@gmail.com> wrote:

1) the TMBG thing was awesome, and I'm really stoked that almost all of us had a piece in it.  I'd like to keep that sort of momentum going, but maybe narrow the focus to just us, or other chicago based IF authors.  i threw out an idea in my last e-mail about trading ideas for small games, but if someone has a catchier theme, i'm down.  

I found out about the TMBG challenge after it was already well underway.  I loved the theme, and the short form idea.  Building a game in a few hours is pretty appealing to me, as I have a hard time committing to long projects.  So...in short, +1 for this.
 

2) i think i'm going to start teaching myself Twine, the hypertext engine.  i've got glimmerings of new project ideas and twine seems like it might better serve them.  so... if people have questions or want to discuss twine and hypertext things, i guess i'm adding it to my wheelhouse.  

3) 826Chi workshop.  I'm TAing a workshop with them now, and I think an IF-based thing could be really good there.  I'm going to try to get a copy of the proposal worksheet, but the one i'm doing is three sessions, and that seems to be the max with most of their seasonal workshops.  I think we'd do best creating games by committee with the kids, portioning up the writing/coding.  I've got more on this topic to discuss, but in person might work best.

I work for the Mozilla Foundation, we're looking for ways to teach 'webmaking'.  Atul Varma, who has dabbled in interactive fiction, built a prototype IF platform that lets you build the stories in html, a mix of creative writing and html skill building.  He's also a big fan of 826, you guys should be best pals, maybe there's a way to combine efforts a bit.
 

4) Dave, what happened with your comp? did you get submissions?  how is that going?

5) Did anyone come up with thoughts for our IF ARG?  I had vague ideas of tying it around riots and political unrest, but maybe that's too charged?  

6) I think I've convinced a NEW person to come to the next meeting.  he's a young 'un, and hasn't had a huge IF background, but he's teaching himself inform right now, so... yeah.

thoughts?

ed.

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[Andrew Schultz]

>I've been lurking on the list for a bit.  I'm new to IF, and have only built a single short short short game (source here).  I won't be able to make any Thursday night meetings until my wife is done with a class she's taking.  It ends in June, so I'm hoping to come out this summer.

Thanks for delurking and sharing your game! I'm acquainted with the Ravenswood post office and know what you mean. Never been to the Irving Park one, though. May go to check it out.

And I'm pretty sure I followed this group a bit before attending a meeting, so I know how it is. And I wrote a ton of "exercise" games before I wrote a real one. It's just fun to do, or to see, hey, Inform can -do- that, because the people behind it wanted text adventures to do stuff, too, and the people writing games well before me needed these resources!

>I found out about the TMBG challenge after it was already well underway.  I loved the theme, and the short form idea.  Building a game in a few hours is pretty appealing to me, as I have a hard time committing to long projects.  So...in short, +1 for this.
 

Yeah, too bad people in the know didn't advertise it more. It was the first time with such a big project and I didn't think we'd cover all 38 games, but we did. People traded beta-tests and transcripts and so forth & I'm still getting them post-release and tweaking stuff.

I think a lot of people spent more than a few hours' time, but yeah, it's good to keep a game short. You don't have to write something super long and probably shouldn't.

>I work for the Mozilla Foundation, we're looking for ways to teach 'webmaking'.  Atul Varma, who has dabbled in interactive fiction, built a prototype IF platform that lets you build the stories in html, a mix of creative writing and html skill building.  He's also a big fan of 826, you guys should be best pals, maybe there's a way to combine efforts a bit.

Wow...I'd be interested in that too. It sounds like you probably know enough to learn pretty much any programming language there is. Reading that people are involved in a project like 826 makes me want to try and move along and do my part to bring people along with games like this.

Again, welcome (though I'm not an official welcomer--just good to see someone new) and if you don't want to throw out a question about Inform to intfiction.org and worry it might be too trivial, send a question here!

    Andrew

[Ed Blair]

Can I be official welcomer?  I'm calling it. Welcome, Chris!

Who's Atul? Sounds like someone I should know. 

--

[Chris McAvoy]

Atul is a cool dude.  He wrote the original version of Parchment (with help?) http://www.toolness.com/wp/2008/06/introducing-parchment/

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[Ben Collins-Sussman]

Atul also helped me write the pure-python z-machine implementation.
:-) http://code.google.com/p/zvm