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IF Authors' Workshop

In response to several recent threads on rec.arts.int-fiction, I've decided to have a shot at organizing a cooperative IF Authors' Workshop. This workshop is designed for folks (including myself) who are developing works of interactive fiction and would like to give and receive some ongoing feedback on the design and writing process.

The goal is for us to help one another develop stronger, more compelling, more wonderful works.

A workshop is only as strong as its participants want it to be. If you'd like the workshop to succeed, all you have to do is sign up, get involved, and stay involved! Conversely, if you're not committed to finishing your game and making it as good as possible, this workshop is not for you.

I will provide coordination services for the workshop. In its initial phase, the setup will be simple -- no web forms for submission, no listserv, nothing fancy. I'll monitor communications and make sure the participants have access to the works-in-progress. I will also prepare a report (after the passage of some suitable amount of time) summarizing the results for r.a.i-f, so that others can learn from our experiment.

The guidelines below should not be regarded as set in stone. If there's a consensus that the process should be changed, we'll change it.

The deadline for the 2008 IF Comp is Sept. 29. In all likelihood, the workshop will end at that time, if it hasn't ended earlier. At any rate, that's a good target. If everyone wants to continue after that, or start a new workshop, we'll do so.

Guidelines

Participation will be limited to no more than nine or ten authors. If more people are rushing to sign up, we might fission into two groups. If fewer than three or four people sign up, or if the participation rate drops below that level, I reserve the right to pull the plug.

Both first-time authors and those who have previously released games are welcome to join.

If you don't have enough free time to join right now, please feel free to contact me and let me know you're interested in joining at some point in the near future. If there are still openings when you get back to working on your game, you'll be welcome to join. If the group is so large that adding more people would make it unmanageable, we'll put you on a waiting list.

The workshop will be agnostic with respect to development systems: You can use Inform 6 or 7, TADS 2 or 3, ADRIFT, Hugo, or even BASIC. You will be expected to provide alpha release versions that can run on, at the very least, both Mac and Windows platforms. (For instance, if you're using Inform, a .z5 or .z8 file would be acceptable, because it can be played by interpreters on many platforms.)

The main purpose of the workshop will not be to provide solutions to particular coding challenges. Doubtless questions of this sort will come up in discussion, but if you have a technical problem, the way to find a solution is to post a message on r.a.i-f. The workshop will be mainly about design, story, and writing issues.

We'll also be as agnostic as possible with respect to genre. Fantasy, detective, humor, classic dungeon-crawl, whatever -- you're welcome to present it to the group. For practical reasons, all games will have to be written in English. Also, while I try to be broadminded about profanity and adult situations, if any of the participants is under 18, I reserve the right to shut the door on anything that I regard as outright pornography.

If you want to join the workshop, here's how: Send an email to me (midiguru23@sbcglobal.net). You can tell me as much or as little as you'd like about your work-in-progress, but at minimum I would like to learn: (a) what language you're programming in; (b) whether you have previously released any IF; (c) the basic concept of the game you're working on, including a description of the setting, the main characters, and the main events in the story; (d) how far along you are in developing the game; and (e) what areas you're hoping the workshop will help you with (writing, puzzle development, etc.).

Some level of commitment and seriousness will be expected of workshop participants. Naturally, we all lead busy lives, and I'm sure everyone will be happy to cut a little slack for a regular participant who gets derailed for a week or two by outside forces. As a general guideline, however, workshop participants should be prepared to spend several hours every week developing their own game, and several more hours every week checking out other authors' works-in-progress and providing detailed feedback via email. If you can't make that commitment of time, you won't be able to get much benefit from the workshop. And if the workshop should happen to fill up and there should happen to be anyone on the waiting list, I might ask for a group vote on whether to boot out an inactive member in favor of an eager newcomer.

Participants will be asked to send me an alpha version of their game every week (or at most, once every two weeks). On Sunday nights I will zip all of these and post them on a private web page for download. Obviously, the alpha versions won't be free of bugs, but you should at least have done enough testing on your own to make sure that your game will run. Along with the alpha version, you'll be encouraged to provide a text file that describes where you're going with the game, explains unimplemented features, and directs the other workshoppers to specific places where you'd like feedback.

When you have a little free time, download the latest zip file, load one of the works, and try it out. You can email your comments to the author directly, but you're strongly encouraged to send me copies of all critiques and all responses to them. Every few days I'll assemble all of the emails I've received and send them to all participants. The main reason for doing this is because we can all learn from reading one another's comments. In addition, I suspect it may keep the general tone of the comments more friendly if we're all aware that we're having a public discussion. If you start ripping someone's game to shreds, everyone will read your comments, and you can expect the same merciless treatment.

If the foregoing raises questions for you that it fails to answer, please ask! Like everything else on the Internet, this page may be updated at any time.