Ten Rooms Web IF Game Mini-Competition

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.

1. Create a new and original Interactive Fiction game.
2. The game must have exactly ten rooms.
3. 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.
4. Use any tools you wish, but see #5.
5. Game must be playable in a browser.
6. 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.
7. 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).

FyreVM now Open Source

As I begin working on Zifmia, an open source project to develop a cross-ifplatform client/server system, I needed to take an initial first step.

FyreVM, a glulx implementation with a different IO system, is now a sourceforge project under the MIT license.

We’re looking to have TADS 3, z-code, glulx, hugo, and any other systems integrated into zifmia. If you want to chip in programming, it would be greatly appreciated.