The Textfyre Times

Ten Rooms Web IF Game Mini-Competition

David Cornelson — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:33:02 +0000

As announced on intfiction.org, I’m running a mini-competition with a very specific style of game in mind. I call it the Ten Room Web IF Game Mini-Competition. The idea is to get people focused specifically on the art and design of a small game whose map fits on screen while balancing story and puzzle for such a construct. I have a web page site up for the mini-comp at http://www.textfyre.com/tenrooms.
The rules are summarized below.

Create a new and original Interactive Fiction game.
The game must have exactly ten rooms.
The map of all ten rooms must be visually accessible in 2D format or if you’re a snappy graphic artist, some sort of 3D imagery is acceptable. You must provide a graphical map.
Use any tools you wish, but see #5.
Game must be playable in a browser.
Hosting Requirement *** REMOVED ***. You can send your games to me to host on Linux or Windows Server 2008 (IIS), or you can host them yourself. I’d still like to authenticate players completing each game somehow, possibly through an AJAX call with a game-embedded password or something.
Bug fixes will be allowed at all times after games are “released”.

Competition Deadlines: February 1, 2012 – Sign up deadline. This gives you time to think about it, play around with some ideas, and decide if you want to proceed.
March 15, 2012 – Beta submissions.
April 30, 2012 – Final submissions, voting begins.
May 15, 2012 – Voting Ends, winner announced.

Competition Voting: Open web voting from people proven to have played through all of the games. Since all of the games need to be playable online, I’ll rig up an authentication system to allow voting once a user has completed all of the games.

Competition Prizes: I’m not sure what anyone will be interested in as a prize, so I’m open to suggestions. Textfyre will donate $100 to the best game based on my own judging (since the intended judging criteria are suspect and may not work out - if we can get that straightened out and there are more than a couple of submissions, the $100 will go to the judged winner).

Waiting on Art and Stuff

David Cornelson — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:12:51 +0000

It’s been five months since my last post and honestly it seems like yesterday for me. Having taken on a team lead/architect consulting role has pretty much sapped all of my free time. The result is almost no work done on the new Textfyre website and no progress on publishing existing content to mobile platforms. Trying to get Empath completed or even thinking about new games has been impossible.

I am pushing Klockwerk to the #1 eReader device (about which I can’t discuss openly until we are actually published), but there are a couple of artifacts in the works that need to be completed before that happens. One of which is artwork. There will be a unique and new drawing for each chapter within Shadow in the Cathedral. Some of these drawings include the tea machine, Covalt, and the Cathedral of Time. Trust me, when you see the results you’ll be amazed. The artist I’m working with is great, but slow.

I also have to pull together a good tutorial mode for the game and I’m working on that. It’s obvious that Jon Ingold is focused on Inkle now, but he’s been able to help with some of the required changes to the Shadow source code.

The Textfyre website with a Web 2.0 game play mode is mostly completed, but there are some performance issues I’m still working through. The big hit comes from serializing the engine every turn. I may have to work through caching logic to resolve these issues. I also need to get Shadow and Secret Letter implemented and run through testing on them. I plan to have Cloak of Darkness, Shadow, and Secret Letter available when the new site launches.

The cool thing about the website is that it works very well on the iPad.

Textfyre is still here, plugging along.

Meeting Encyclopedia Britannica

David Cornelson — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 19:30:04 +0000

When I was at TechWeek, a start-up/entrepreneurial conference here in Chicago, I met a couple of representatives from Encyclopedia Britannica. We chatted about my company and what we could do if we worked together. This led to a meeting in their office in the city this morning.

I gave them a demonstration of various Interactive Fiction examples and we talked about how we could develop classroom oriented applications using their content and the IF medium. They were very excited about the prospect and we’re moving forward with a plan to develop a prototype. They’re offering access to all of their content and when the prototype is ready, they will do the leg work of putting in front of administrators, teachers, and students and gathering feedback. If the prototype looks marketable, they will take over the entire marketing and sales process.

Textfyre has moved away from a strictly education-oriented model, but this is likely to branch some of my efforts, which is a good thing.

I still need to get in touch with my contact at the Chicago Public Schools, so stay tuned for more education-oriented news.

Textfyre’s New Image

David Cornelson — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 16:42:51 +0000

For many reasons, mostly to do with audience outreach, I requisitioned a new logo that will be apart of the new Zifmia-based web design. Take a look.

Zifmia – Nearing Beta Release

David Cornelson — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 04:59:00 +0000

Overheard on ifMUD last week was an observation-only comment about Zifmia being vaporware. I was amused by the comment, since I have made great progress on the entire project in the last few months. I just haven’t been talking about it all that much. Since there has been no demonstration of Zifmia and no public discussion, the vaporware comment was accurate.

However, that is all about to change. I have a working system and although I’m slightly side-tracked with a potential investor meeting on the 16th, a beta of Zifmia is coming this month. The beta will be a replacement of the entire Textfyre.com website into a game portal for Interactive Fiction developed with Inform 7, FyreVM and Zifmia extensions, images, js, css, and html.

A version of Cloak of Darkness will be present in the beta along with a demo version of Shadow in the Cathedral. A full version of Shadow will be added when the payment system is ready. Other features will be added over time, including the ability to upload your own games and web provisioning. I intend the beta of the new Textfyre website to be an extended period of time, to let the kinks iron out.

One of the first tasks will be to adapt extensions for the “standard” Zifmia design, which will be very simple. You can see a functional sample of the latest standard design at http://textfyre.com/design/zifmia-design-2.html. The opening page is a templated “prologue” and following a press of any key, the main template is displayed. Currently there is a column of main text, some spot art, fly out text windows on the left and right, a command line text box, along with map and hint buttons.

Templates are based on straight HTML5/CSS3 using jQuery and various jQuery plugins. I’ve tested this design with IE9, FF 5, and Chrome. It does not work on mobile devices as I see that as a separate template entirely. I plan to investigate jQuery Mobile to help with that work.

I plan to move forward with this design and implement an Inform 7 extension to implement the various pieces. It shouldn’t be too hard to create simple Inform 7 markup that translates to html with known classes.

Feel free to test it out and leave comments.

Techweek in Chicago

David Cornelson — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 13:45:10 +0000

So I’ve been attending an entrepreneur conference in Chicago this weekend and I’ve found the whole thing very interesting.

First there was the keynotes, which underlined the nature of Chicago’s seeming up and coming start up nature. And then a couple of sessions I attended were quite volatile.

The Education 2.0 session had very passionate people arguing about content and censorship, about rural Internet access, and that the start up world is looking at web 10.0 as opposed to the schools systems just sort of figuring out and having meetings on web 2.0. I ended up getting contact info from a VP at Britannica and the CTO of the Chicago Public Schools. Both seemed genuinely interested in reviewing IF and helping us work in classrooms.

Saturday morning I attended a session on responsive web design, which essentially showed how you can use the @media screen tag to create alternate views of your site based on max width, resolution, and other criteria. Very helpful if you want to create HTML for multiple devices and have it change based on CSS criteria alone.

Another morning session was on social data and this too seemed to catch people’s attention. The general concern is that there could, and already is, a sort of “character rating system” which will compile data on all of your purchase history, your social history, employment history, financial records, and allow someone to segment the population by who should be provided an easier path to wealth than others. Do you go to the library or the bar? Do you purchase healthy foods? Do you read comic books or economic journals? Do you maintain a savings account? What sort of things to you say on Facebook or Twitter? This seems both inevitable and deeply frightening.

The last session for Saturday was about Gamification and the panel was made up of iconic game designers involved in Mortal Combat, Tony Hawk, Call of Duty, and more. The discussion talked about rubberbanding games and then using social media and various kinds of rewards to keep people at a website.

I’m taking Sunday off to decompress and assimilate everything. I had not planned to attend the Monday sessions, but it looks like it has most of the entreprenurial content. It looks like a must-attend day from Textfyre’s perspective.

Zifmia Updated

David Cornelson — Mon, 09 May 2011 17:10:14 +0000

On the way to PAX East I had intended on getting a new version of Zifmia ready to show at the Demo Fair. It was a lofty and unreasonable goal, given the changes I was making to the service. There were several issues, including adding the very complicated branching capabilities as well as refactoring large swaths of the code.

After PAX, I was continuing this work and getting frustrated with the mapping between the Zifmia object model and data storage. I was using SQL Server, which is fine for most things, but I just thought a simple object storage system would be more suitable, especially given the availability of using Linq, a Microsoft invention that allows native code queries on lists of objects.

A typical Linq query goes something like this…say I want to find a session.

ZifmiaSession session = (from ZifmiaSession s in db where s.Id = sessionId select s).FirstOrDefault();

I can do this if “db” is an object-oriented database or if I’ve implemented some mapping tool to allow for this type of query. With an object-oriented database that implements Linq, I can retrieve anything with one line of code. I can’t tell you how much easier this is to code, test, and deploy.

So I went looking for an oodb that met my requirements, mostly that it was free, had Linq capability, and performed well. I [played around with a few commercial products like DB4O, but eventually settled on Eloquera.

Eloquera has turned out to be an enormously helpful change in Zifmia’s inner workings. The code is much smaller, cleaner, and just as fast as SQL Server had been.

Over this past weekend I finished up the unit testing, got the original AJAX regression test working, and the code is in pretty good shape. I may still go through one more refactoring, but that will be later. The goal now is to implement user interfaces, clean up anything I missed, and get games out.

The code is currently checked into the FyreVM repository on SF.Net, but will move to its own Zifmia repository soon.

Web/Facebook, iPad, Android Tablet, and more UI’s are on the way along with games games games.

Zifmia 2011, A Session Odyssey

David Cornelson — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 04:29:14 +0000

Me: So how does Zifmia work again? The user registers, logs in, fires up a game from a list of installed games?

Me: Yes. Internally, there is a register service method that returns a registration object, a login service method that returns credentials for further access to the service layer, a list games service method, and a session/start service method. The last one returns a session object that contains mostly everything a client needs to draw the user interface.

Me: The can enter a command to progress the game?

Me: Yes. This is the session/command service method that also returns a session object. Internally, after a started game and after every command, some other work is going on. This includes saving transcript text and history data.

Me. So then the user backtracks and wants to go in a different direction. Do they use save and restore to do this in a Zifmia client?

Me. No. Save and Restore are meaningless in Zifmia. The service keeps track of every turn, every command, and stores the game data for every turn. The user can go back to any point and the server will reproduce the results of that turn and simply resend the session data to the client. If the user wants to “branch” off into a new direction, they would be starting a new session, but the service keeps track of branching sessions.

Me. So a session is a branch or the whole tree?

Me. Um, Um, $*$#()( segfault 940394 $(#)$(#)……

…..rebooting…..

Me. You okay?

Me. Affirmative, Dave. I read you.

Me. Good. What happened?

Me. Well you said “session is a branch or the whole tree” and I had been working on the assumption that it was a branch, but it’s really the whole tree.

Me. Then what’s a branch?

Me. I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

Me. I do, but you can explain it better.

Me. Okay here it goes. When a user start a game, the service creates a session. The session has a current branch number, which the user never sees. The session also has a current turn number, but we’re going to call that node. The service will track each turn as a node. A node is of a session and a branch. If the user backtracks and enters a new command at any node, the service checks to see if any other node matches that command (it would have to have the same parent or be the root branch). If there is an existing node, that node’s data is returned to the client. If not, a new node is created, with a new branch number, the command is executed, and the results are returned, as a node, to the client.

Me. “Node” is very mathy. Could you rename it?

Me. I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Me. Okay.

Me. So I have a lot of work to do. I have to refactor several objects and create a few new ones, change the service layer, update the javascript client, and update the regression test.

Me. Sounds boring. You should get outside more.

Me. Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.

Grant Opportunities and IF

David Cornelson — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 17:29:07 +0000

I keep track of government grant opportunities, even though I would need a partner on the academic side to apply for one.

Check out the list at

http://ies.ed.gov/funding/ncer_progs.asp

Zifmia, the Web, and Mobile Devices

David Cornelson — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 20:08:02 +0000

I’m still working on the web client for Zifmia and it’s going slow, mostly because I keep changing the AJAX interface to get everything so it’s compact and very simple. There’s a regression test working now at http://zifmia.textfyre.com/regressiontest.html. The tests include registering a user, logging in, listing games, starting a game session, sending a command to that session, getting a session, getting a previous turn in a session, and then listing all sessions for a logged-in user.

The clientside javascript is wrapped up in the following files:

http://zifmia.textfyre.com/scripts/strings.js – has an extension method on String that allows traditional formatting with arguments.
http://zifmia.textfyre.com/scripts/zifmia.js – the main AJAX calls to the Zifmia service
http://zifmia.textfyre.com/scripts/zifmia-controller-regression.js – the regression test implementation of the controller.
http://zifmia.textfyre.com/scripts/zifmia-controller.js – the sample imlpementation of the controller.
http://zifmia.textfyre.com/scripts/zifmia-htmlformatting.js – has an extension method for converting text to html, currently only looks a newlines and turns them into BR tags.

There’s a jquery-min.js file in there as well…I think I have 1.3, but should upgrade to 1.4.

* * * *

I took the plunge this past week and purchased an iPad 2 and a Mac-Mini. Paid extra for the iPad and got a deal on the mini, both off of craigslist, so it more or less evened out.

I installed xcode 4 and with a lot of help from the gang on ifMUD, started getting an iPad client for Zifmia going. I have a lot of hoops to jump through, not to mention learning Objective C, but it doesn’t seem that hard right now. Just different crazy syntax issues.

My idea for the iPad client is similar to the web client, but it won’t be called “Zifmia”, it will be the Textfyre app. I plan to make the client free, but zifmia will allow games to be installed as pay per use games. The nice thing is that this will allow games to be installed in Zifmia that require payment or be free. I haven not figured out how this will work and am aware of the more draconian principals around Apple’s pay for content model, but this seems like a reasonable direction.

Anyone that builds their own client is still free to do so. I may have to split the server into two installations, one for Zifmia and one for Textfyre, but for now I’ll leave it in a merged “beta” state.

As for the iPad client itself, I envision being able to type in commands as usual, but being able to swipe backwards for previous output (one turn per page), have expandable live mapping, note taking, comments at a given location for a given game-state (I’ll have to figure out how to manage this so we don’t show spoilers), common commands used by other users, and local play with a built-in FyreVM engine that resyncs to the server when it can.

I’m less interested in smartphones now. The tablet is the way to go and I’ll have to look at doing the same work on the Galaxy Tab or other Android tablets.