What's New Among Zarf's Pages

Check here to see if I've added anything interesting since, well, the last time you checked here. You can also see what was new in previous years.

July 12, 2010

Late, because I was getting ready for Readercon: books I bought in the first half of 2010, and what I thought of each one.

July 11, 2010

Back from Readercon, where I gave a short introduction to IF for writers. Jason Scott also showed his Get Lamp documentary (the convention cut, 60 minutes), and folks from the book-fandom world seemed willing to be interested in IF as a topic. At least for two hours on a Saturday evening.

July 4, 2010

Meet the 1.0 release of Quixe, a pure-Javascript interpreter for the Glulx IF virtual machine. You can use this to put Glulx games (the larger games generated by Inform 7) on a web page. Try out Adventure on a web page.

June 21, 2010

I've just posted a short IF work: Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home, my contribution to @party. (You can play it right in your web browser, like my other IF games.)

June 16, 2010

This weekend I took part in an online chat about rule-based programming. Our original intent was to design a complete (albeit tiny) programming language. We didn't succeed at that, but we did have a useful discussion of the programming ideas I've been idly kicking around for the past several years. Now they've been kicked farther. Thanks to William Byrd for suggesting this, and to him, Cassie Orr, and Doug Orleans for participating.

May 5, 2010

Zarf's List of Interactive Games on the Web. Remember that? I found a cached copy, so now it's back on my web site where it belongs. A couple of the links even still work!

April 25, 2010

All the games on my interactive fiction page are now hooked up with Parchment, a Javascript Z-code interpreter. What this means: you can play them all in your web browser. Scooch down the list, pick a game, click the link. Some of them even have nice fonts.

April 10, 2010

This is a handy IF-for-beginners card that we came up with for the People's Republic of Interactive Fiction Hospitality Suite at PAX-East 2010. (Kudos to Lea Albaugh for the design and layout.) It's Creative-Commons licensed, so you can use it in your own games, print out copies to pass around, translate, etc.

April 4, 2010

I have posted my absurdly long and detailed PAX East report over at the Gameshelf. Summary: awesome. If you want to see me (or hear me) talk, Jason Scott has video and audio of the GET LAMP panel discussion that I was part of.

March 8, 2010

JayIsGames is featuring my competition entry Dual Transform today. And they say nice things about it, too.

March 3, 2010

A quick experiment in presenting IF: Transmatte. This is not a way to play IF, but rather a way to excerpt an IF scene on a web page, in order to discuss it. You create a handful of transcripts which demonstrate your point; the transmatte.py script munges them together into a dynamic web page. Go look at the examples, it's easier than explaining how it works.

February 24, 2010

This is a frightening burst of web-site activity, isn't it? I just re-played Myst 5 -- my second time through. But this time I wrote a review. Finally.

February 22, 2010

My game Dual Transform has just been awarded second place... in a three-way tie for second place... in the JayIsGames Casual Game Design Competition #7. Yes, that was me; I entered the competition under a pseudonym, "Nigel Smith". (Bonus points if you can tell me why I chose that as the pseudonym, and "Dual Transform" as the game's title.) I will have a post-comp release, with full credits to my betatesters, up in a few days.

The results were interesting. Looking at the score breakdown, it's clear that I completely tanked on "Theme"; I might well have won otherwise. That's perfectly fair. I deliberately took a very skew, understated approach to the competition's theme of "escape". I knew that it might not fly with everybody, and it obviously didn't.

February 17, 2010

Twitter must be old now, because I've gotten sucked in. Here's me on Twitter. I'm still feeling my way into the vibe and I'm not following many people, so don't be offended, but I'm using it and I think this mild burning sensation must be what they call "fun".

February 14, 2010

This isn't much of a web site yet, but I have put up a page for The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction -- the Boston local IF meetup group, organized by Kevin Jackson-Mead. (We'll be improving the page over time. Or maybe not! Wait and see.) Note particularly the link for IF activity at Penny Arcade Expo East in Boston this March. We'll be hosting an open hang-out room for IF fans, authors, and interested newcomers.

And as long as I'm posting off-site links, check out this Werewolf article in Wired UK.

January 1, 2010

Happy new year, and on time for once: the books I bought in the second half of 2009. And what I thought of each one. I extended the existing "2009" page, so if the early entries look familiar, skip down to August.

November 29, 2009

I am thrilled to announce that my game Spider And Web has been translated into Russian by Vsevolod Zoubarev. He volunteered to do this over a year ago, and he has been working tirelessly, almost entirely on his own -- he asked me just a couple of questions over the entire development cycle. I am extremely grateful to Vsevolod for his interest and perseverance.

You can download the game file (and accompanying introductory files, also in Russian).

Vsevolod has entered his translation in the KRIL (Russian Interactive Fiction Competition), in the "translation of a foreign game" category. He tells me that there are no other entries in that category, so it will win a somewhat anticlimactic victory. But please join me in congratulating him regardless!

October 27, 2009

Here's a weekend hack I whipped up for the Boston IF meetup: Mutagen, a simple Javascript library for generating pseudorandom strings of text. Push the button! Keep pushing it.

Source code is linked from the explanation page. Feel free to use it or port it or whatever. It's more of an example than a usable tool, but it might solve somebody's problem somewhere.

October 9, 2009

Look what I posted fifteen years ago today!

System's Twilight was released on October 8, 1994. But I waited a day before posting to Usenet, because I wanted to make sure it had propagated to all the Info-Mac FTP mirrors.

October 7, 2009

I haven't done a review post in a while. I've been playing the games, but they haven't been turning into reviews. I've been doing other stuff, mostly. But specially for you -- Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper.

Some recent games have been turning into bits of commentary, which I'm ashamed to even call "mini-reviews". But you can see them on my Quick Take Reviews page, and also in this Gameshelf blog post I just made.

August 2, 2009

Backdated entry here, sorry. I put this up in time for Worldcon, but forgot to add it to the "what's new" list. Now you know: the books I bought in the first half of 2009, and what I thought of each one.

May 5, 2009

Have a look at Rule-Based Programming in Interactive Fiction. This is a slide presentation I gave at Penguicon 7, on May 3, 2009. I describe the programming model which Inform 7 is based on, and then go on to a more general rule model which I am still trying to figure out. (See also my earlier notes on rule-based programming.)

March 1, 2009

A week ago I, along with my Volity cohorts Jmac and Other Andy, launched Planbeast: a web calendar and notification service for scheduling Xbox Live games. It works. It's nifty. You can sign up, schedule a game of -- whatever your favorite multiplayer Xbox game is -- and then other people can sign on to play with you. It's got web forum features and buddy-list features and RSS and iCal features and all the other stuff you'd expect.

Is this a valuable service? We think so. (Okay, Jmac thinks so -- he's the one with an Xbox -- and I agree with him.) You can get on Xbox Live and search for a random game of anything, but unless it's a super-popular game, you probably won't find any. With Planbeast, you can arrange to meet people in advance -- which makes it much more likely that a game will actually happen. Plus, if you've already exchanged hellos on the web site, you're not going into a totally blind Internet playdate. Play with the same people a few times, and you're not strangers.

Check it out. Let us know how it works for you.

January 25, 2009

A few weeks late: books I bought in the second half of 2008. And what I thought of each one. I extended the existing "2008" page, so if the early entries look familiar, skip down to Axis in late June for new ones.

January 12, 2009

Boodler 2.0, the latest and vastly improved version of my tool for generating infinite, never-repeating soundscapes. Now at its permanent home at boodler.org.

January 4, 2009

Here's some more nostalgia: the write-up of Inhumane that appeared in The Book of Adventure Games II in 1985. My first review! Entirely fair, considering that it was reviewing a game I wrote in BASIC as an Infocom parody. I was 15 when I saw it, and it was about the best thing ever. Thank you, Kim R. Schuette, wherever you are.

January 1, 2009

2009 is the fifteenth anniversary year of System's Twilight, my old Mac puzzle extravaganza. In celebration, I'm releasing the audio files. (CC license.) All the little zip, zwoop, sproing noises that I made for the original game. Download as MP3, AIFF, or iPhone ringtones.

December 11, 2008

Short adventure game, short review, but a good one: Outcry (aka Sublustrum).

(What? It's a good game, so I gave it a good review. Syllepsis!)

December 10, 2008

I've had some short fanfic snippets in my Thoughts of Days for years now. I didn't call them out in "What's New" because they were small, and I felt dimly embarrassed about featuring fanfic alongside my "real" work.

Well, it's almost 2010 now, which is The Future, and the hell with dim embarrassment. Besides, now that I've written a 10-kiloword novelette which is (sort of) in the Stargate setting, there's no point in pretending it's not real work.

To the left, however, you may still be uninterested by this stuff. I do not claim that these stories make sense to people who don't know the original material. (Some fanfic does, but some fanfic writers are a hell of a lot better than me.) So, if you're not into Stargate (or Myst, or villanelles), take what they're worth.

The following are now linked from my writing page. The first three are from 2005; the rest are recent.

November 5, 2008

Not in time for Halloween, and nearly in time for the election, I present my short story for the season: Ghost Story. This was my contribution to ostrich_2008, a Livejournal story event for writers who wanted to not think about the US election for a while. (I wanted to have the story finished before the election started, but Dixville Notch got past me. Drat them!) You are welcome to leave comments on the original Livejournal post.

The story is a thematic followup (though not a sequel) to A Terror in Flesh, which I wrote for the 2004 election.

A personal note (rare, I know): I've lived in a lot of places in the Eastern US. Last night, I wondered if it was possible for all of them to tap Obama. New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts would for certain. Pennsylvania -- I worried in the last few days, but I shouldn't have. For Virginia I held my breath, and indeed it was the final nail in the Republican coffin. But North Carolina? It isn't officially declared as I write this. But the fact that it's close, and edging towards Obama: that's a sweet, sweet feeling.

September 20, 2008

And now it's still the same month, but I'm burning through the adventure back-stack before console-game season arrives. A review of Overclocked, a very interesting game from a German design house. I was impressed.

September 6, 2008

I guess it's still the same quarter, but here's Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis (aka Sherlock Holmes vs Arsène Lupin). With bonus comments about Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened. Mixed feelings.

July 23, 2008

This quarter's game review: Agon: The Lost Sword of Toledo. Not as good as the original three Agon episodes.

July 6, 2008

I've decided to do this semiannually -- I got tired of forgetting details about half the books when I go to write December's review-glut. So, here's my list of books I bought in the first half of 2008. And what I thought of each one.

June 27, 2008

Been working on this one for a few weeks. GlkOte: a Javascript library for IF interfaces. This is the Javascript half of a web-application Glk/Glulx interpreter. The other half will be called RemGlk, but it doesn't exist yet. But this half still has uses. Check out the fake IF demo game! (Requires Javascript.)

May 11, 2008

We now have LOLGRUE t-shirts! (Eagerly awaited ever since the LOLGRUES first appeared.) "Hungry grue iz HUUNNGRY" is the slogan. The background shows the cutest grue we could find, illustrated in the oscuroscuro technique which is traditional in grue folk art. Courtesy of Cafepress.

(If these are popular enough, I'll pony up for a real Cafepress page and add more LOLGRUE slogans.)

May 7, 2008

Review of The Lost Crown, the latest ghost adventure from Jonathan Boakes.

April 29, 2008

I've finally gotten out a major update of Draco Concordans. Well, not major -- about twenty entries updated, out of over 900. But I added a couple of good bits.

Most of the new material was discovered or figured out by commenters. Thanks to my father, Esa Peuha, Rydra Wong, and the late Avram Davidson (whose Adventures in Unhistory is fifteen treasure troves of recherché wealth).

April 23, 2008

New essay on Game Genre and Game Interaction. I presented this as a talk at UVA on the 22nd.

April 3, 2008

It's the great new craze that's sweeping the Internet, and who am I to disagree? LOLGRUES!

(Don't miss my epic rendering of all of Zork 1 in LOLGRUE.)

March 25, 2008

My last Uru post brought up the idea of a completely fan-run game for the Uru community. Here is my design sketch for how to build it.

(Link is to my essay as posted on the Gameshelf Blog. It's also in my regular collection of Uru essays on this web site. But the Gameshelf is prettier and allows comments and stuff.)

March 23, 2008

New puzzle: Praser 12. This is not IF; it's not interactive at all, just a web page containing a puzzle. Read the document, you can solve the puzzle.

("Praser" is a label I've applied to a series of puzzles I've been creating since I was a kid. There's no connecting story or theme. Praser 5 is the only other one that's online; the rest weren't that great. 12 benefits from my experience playing the MIT Mystery Hunt, so expect that sort of thing if you're familiar with it.)

March 11, 2008

The iPhone SDK was announced last week, and I followed through on my self-promise and bought an iPhone. Behold my first iPhone application: Zarf's iPhone Note Recorder.

To be sure, I didn't make this with the SDK. (Apple won't start approving third-party apps until June.) It's a web toy. It's not even a web application; it's just a Javascript widget. You type in some text, and the widget turns it into a link. Bookmark the link, sync it to your iPhone (or iPod Touch), and you have your text on your mobile. Since the iPhone lacks a synchable note tool, I find this very handy. (I used it to transfer my book list.) At least it'll be handy until June, when fifteen third-party note apps will be released at once.

March 5, 2008

Gamasutra offered to reprint my Uru: Beyond Cancellation essay as an opinion piece. Go me!

February 23, 2008

Because I can't leave the dead alone, I have written up my ideas for a Better Instancing System for Uru Live. No, it will never be adopted. But if you're designing a new MMO adventure game, it might be a good starting point.

February 14, 2008

Next adventure review: Next Life. Annoying almost beyond words. But I found some words anyway.

February 10, 2008

A week ago we were told, after weeks of silence, that Myst Online: Uru Live was being cancelled. Again. I have now finished writing my thoughts beyond cancellation.

By the way, if you watch this page but want more Zarfy goodness, check out the new Gameshelf Blog. Regular commentary -- well, irregular commentary -- on games and gaming of all sorts, by Jmac (a Volity co-conspirator), myself, and others. The Uru essay above is crossposted there, but scroll down; there's more you haven't seen.

January 13, 2008

A short story, simultaneously Myst and Edward Whittemore fanfic: Restored Memoir (Lara Collection 003.001). If you recognize traces of other stories, that wouldn't be a coincidence.

January 6, 2008

My list of books I bought in 2007 (plus a few more) and what I thought of each one.

December 24, 2007

Been a while since I wrote a game review, so here's Ghost in the Sheet.

November 11, 2007

A couple of random Uru projects:

September 26, 2007

I whipped off a Python implementation of the Condorcet Ranked-Pairs election system. I used this algorithm a couple of years ago for the Ice Game Design Contest; but the implementation I used then was based on some really old Python libraries, and getting it running was painful. This is a simple Python script. Perhaps you will find it useful.

September 22, 2007

Short review: Barrow Hill: Curse of the Ancient Circle.

September 16, 2007

And now, progress on Boodler!

Boodler version 1.6.0 is now up. This is functionally similar to the old 1.5.3 release; it's not the all-dancing all-new system. That's in progress. But I have made serious improvements in the distribution:

September 3, 2007

So I haven't been writing game reviews; I haven't been making much progress on Boodler; I haven't been writing IF. What, my loyal fans wonder, have I been working on?

Draco Concordans: a concordance for John M. Ford's The Dragon Waiting.

This is a big chunk of work. I started in back in February, and I've been pounding on it steadily since then. My aim has been to cover all the allusions, in-jokes, historical references, indirections, and implications in Ford's novel. I also index the appearances of all the characters and historical figures. All cross-referenced and cross-linked for your edification.

I am under no illusion that I found everything. (In general, I don't know history from a hole in the ground -- although I did a lot of digging in this particular field.) Contributions are welcome. See the web site for my contact info. I will be updating it as information arrives.

July 11, 2007

Alexander v. Below has contributed a version of StonerView as a MacOSX screensaver. There was one of those already, but now it's a universal binary, and the source code is available as a modern-style Mac XCode project.

July 4, 2007

And a review of the second Uru episode, "A New Light". (Which is Episode 6, to reduce future confusion.)

May 31, 2007

My review of Uru's first monthly story episode, "Scars".

May 6, 2007

Hymn to a Mad Scientist, as would be performed by Gene Wilder if he'd ever heard of it or me. I wrote this almost a year ago, in honor of the Narbonic web-comic by Shaenon Garrity. Why post it now? Because Shaenon Garrity included it in the comments to today's Narbonic rerun strip. Thanks!

May 4, 2007

Over the past month or so, I have perpetrated a series of posts on the Uru web forums: Plum Lake. Plum Lake is an Age which I have imagined. I am trying a variety of ways to convey in, in the overall medium of a web forum. Consider: I also have a discussion of how the third (the interactive one) played out.

May 1, 2007

Mini-review: Safecracker 2 (more visibly titled Safecracker, but I already reviewed a game with that title).

April 23, 2007

Because it is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, I shall repost A Terror in Flesh. In case you missed it the first time. A short story. (See here for more of IP-STPD.)

April 3, 2007

I have set up a boodler-general mailing list. (Hosted at Sourceforge.) Remember Boodler? That's my nifty soundscape project. Boodler is over five years old, and it's time to wake it back up. If you're interested, subscribe and see what's going on.

March 23, 2007

Mini-review: Echo: Secrets of the Lost Cavern.

March 5, 2007

About me, for once... Delightful Wallpaper has won the 2006 XYZZY awards for Best Writing, Best Puzzles, Best Individual Puzzle, and Best PC.

February 27, 2007

And finally, my complete review of Uru Live. This is the one written for newcomers to Uru. If you've been following my occasional essays, you may also be interested in Role-Playing in the Cavern, which I posted a couple of weeks ago. (Yes, I have ongoing projects not related to Uru. Give me some time.)

January 31, 2007

More Uru hackery (yes, I'm wrapped up in it but good). I will be maintaining change notices for the game. That is, I'll be tracking new things and areas as they appear in the game. And more interestingly, I have RSS feeds for these changes, in three varieties: spoiler, no-spoiler (just tells you that something's new), and location-only (tells you something's new and in what Age). You can subscribe to these feeds with any RSS client, or add them as Livejournal friends, or whatever amuses you.

January 22, 2007

I have updated my Uru Live Ongoing Review page with some essays I have written about the game's current and (possible) future development. These were originally posted on the Uru Live web forums.

January 4, 2007

My list of books I bought in 2006 (plus a few more) and what I thought of each one.

1997 - 2006

What was new in previous years.

RSS version

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