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My Own Interactive Fiction

Early in 2008, Eric Eve and I collaborated on a game called "Mrs. Pepper's Nasty Secret". This game was designed specifically to introduce interactive fiction to newcomers, and for entry in two Comps (competitions) for IF, the Interactive Short Fiction Competition and the IFBeginnersComp. I'm happy to report that the game won both Comps.

After being peripherally fascinated by IF for a number of years, in 1999 I decided I wanted to find out if I could actually create a complete game of my own. The result: Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina. While primitive in some respects compared to the best modern IF -- there's not much of a story -- the game was reviewed favorably. If you enjoy solving puzzles, you may like it a lot.

After a hiatus of only seven years, I returned to IF in the fall of 2006. The result was a game called Last Resort, which you can download from this site, or from the Interactive Fiction Archive (see the Links page for details).

After reading some critical discussion of Last Resort, I decided I needed to rework it. The result, Lydia's Heart, embodies the same story as Last Resort, but a few of the weaker elements of the original version were excised, and the scenario was expanded to include 16 or 18 entirely new puzzles, more interaction with the characters, and a somewhat more articulated dramatic structure. Lydia's Heart was released on August 15, 2007.