IFComp 2012
Comments(2) It’s that time of year again! In fact, it’s been that time of year for more than a week now, but now I’m ready for it. A manageable 28 games up for judging this year, and the few I’ve already tried have been quite short, so I encourage anyone reading this to give it a go themselves instead of just reading blogs about it. (If you can play four a day, you’ll be done in a week!)
Notably, seven of the entries — fully a quarter of the total — are HTML-based, and five of those are in a new CYOA system called “Twine”. Inform is still the most popular authoring system of the Comp, but Twine is more popular this year than all the other non-web-based systems combined. Whether this is the beginning of a trend or just a band enthusiasts agreeing to enter the Comp together, only the future will show.
Twine is /extremely/ easy to use. I don’t know that its enthusiasts have an online clubhouse where they dared each other to all join the compo (if there is one, I would hope I’d have found it!) but it lowers the programming-knowledge bar even from Inform 7.
Twine isn’t actually new — it’s been around since 2009, and Twee (which it’s a frontend for) seems to have been around since 2006 or so. But I think its inventor (Chris “Blue Chairs/Twofold Secret” Klimas) abandoned after a while, and only recently some enthusiasts picked it up and started maintaining it.
Also Anna Anthropy has been advocating for it lately, and a couple of the Twine entries seem to come from folks she probably knows (Porpentine and Ruderbager) but I don’t know if the one from the Developmental English course is related to that.
And as Rowan says, it’s easy to use! If I were writing a CYOA that I didn’t want to display little stats off to the side, that’s what I’d be using.