What's New Among Zarf's Pages
Check here to see if I've added anything interesting since, well, the
last time you checked here.
You can also see
what was new in previous years.
May 7, 2008
Review of
The Lost Crown,
the latest ghost adventure from Jonathan Boakes.
April 29, 2008
I've finally gotten out a major update of
Draco Concordans.
Well, not major -- about twenty entries updated, out of
over 900. But I added a couple of good bits.
Most of the
new material
was discovered or figured out by commenters. Thanks to my father,
Esa Peuha, Rydra Wong, and the late Avram Davidson (whose
Adventures in Unhistory is fifteen treasure troves of
recherché wealth).
April 23, 2008
New essay on
Game Genre and Game Interaction.
I presented this as a talk at UVA on the 22nd.
April 3, 2008
It's the great new craze that's sweeping the Internet, and who am I to
disagree?
LOLGRUES!
(Don't miss my epic rendering of
all of Zork 1 in LOLGRUE.)
March 25, 2008
My last Uru post brought up the idea of a completely fan-run game for
the Uru community. Here is my
design sketch for how to build it.
(Link is to my essay as posted on the
Gameshelf Blog.
It's also in my regular
collection of Uru essays on this web site.
But the Gameshelf is prettier and allows comments and stuff.)
March 23, 2008
New puzzle:
Praser 12.
This is not IF; it's not interactive at all, just a web page containing
a puzzle. Read the document, you can solve the puzzle.
("Praser" is a label I've applied to a series of puzzles I've been creating
since I was a kid. There's no connecting story or theme.
Praser 5 is the only other one that's
online; the rest weren't that great. 12 benefits from my experience
playing the MIT Mystery Hunt,
so expect that sort of thing if you're familiar with it.)
March 11, 2008
The iPhone SDK was announced last week, and I followed through on my
self-promise and bought an iPhone. Behold my first iPhone application:
Zarf's iPhone Note Recorder.
To be sure, I didn't make this with the SDK. (Apple won't start approving
third-party apps until June.) It's a web toy. It's not even a web
application; it's just a Javascript widget. You type in some
text, and the widget turns it into a link. Bookmark the link, sync it
to your iPhone (or iPod Touch), and you have your text on your mobile.
Since the iPhone lacks a synchable note tool, I find this very handy.
(I used it to transfer my book list.)
At least it'll be handy until June, when fifteen third-party note apps
will be released at once.
March 5, 2008
Gamasutra
offered to reprint my
Uru: Beyond Cancellation
essay as an opinion piece. Go me!
February 23, 2008
Because I can't leave the dead alone, I have written up my ideas for a
Better Instancing System
for Uru Live.
No, it will never be adopted. But if you're designing a new MMO adventure
game, it might be a good starting point.
February 14, 2008
Next adventure review:
Next Life.
Annoying almost beyond words. But I found some words anyway.
February 10, 2008
A week ago we were told, after weeks of silence, that Myst Online:
Uru Live was being cancelled. Again. I have now finished writing my
thoughts
beyond cancellation.
By the way, if you watch this page but want more Zarfy goodness,
check out the new
Gameshelf Blog.
Regular commentary -- well, irregular commentary -- on games and gaming
of all sorts, by
Jmac (a
Volity co-conspirator),
myself, and others. The Uru essay above is crossposted there, but
scroll down; there's more you haven't seen.
January 13, 2008
A short story, simultaneously Myst and Edward Whittemore fanfic:
Restored Memoir
(Lara Collection 003.001).
If you recognize traces of other stories, that wouldn't be a
coincidence.
January 6, 2008
My list of
books I bought in 2007
(plus a few more)
and what I thought of each one.
December 24, 2007
Been a while since I wrote a game review, so here's
Ghost in the Sheet.
November 11, 2007
A couple of random
Uru projects:
- More On Writing Games:
Rules for a collaborative narrative journally two-player role-playing
sort of game, intended for the Myst universe.
- Uru Age Route Map:
A subway-style line map of the Ages of Uru, as of the end of the first
"season".
September 26, 2007
I whipped off a Python implementation of the
Condorcet Ranked-Pairs election system.
I used this algorithm a couple of years ago for the
Ice Game Design Contest;
but the implementation I used then was based on some really old Python
libraries, and getting it running was painful. This is a simple Python
script. Perhaps you will find it useful.
September 22, 2007
Short review:
Barrow Hill: Curse of the Ancient Circle.
September 16, 2007
And now, progress on
Boodler!
Boodler version 1.6.0 is now up. This is functionally similar to the old
1.5.3 release; it's not the all-dancing all-new system. That's in progress.
But I have made serious improvements in the distribution:
- Boodler is now built and installed with a standard Python distutils
script. This alone should make life easier for everybody.
- Boodler now builds every output module that it can build, instead
of just one. You can select an output driver when you run it.
- New Ogg Vorbis and Shoutcast output drivers, contributed by
Aaron Griffith.
- An output driver which writes straight to stdout. You can pipe
this into ices or an
equivalent audio streaming client.
- On the Mac, if you have more than one sound device, you can select
any of them for output.
September 3, 2007
So I haven't been writing game reviews; I haven't been making much progress
on Boodler; I haven't been writing IF. What, my loyal fans wonder, have I
been working on?
Draco Concordans:
a concordance for John M. Ford's The Dragon Waiting.
This is a big chunk of work. I started in back in February, and I've been
pounding on it steadily since then. My aim has been to cover all the
allusions, in-jokes, historical references, indirections, and implications
in Ford's novel. I also index the appearances of all the characters and
historical figures. All cross-referenced and cross-linked for your
edification.
I am under no illusion that I found everything. (In general, I don't know
history from a hole in the ground -- although I did a lot of digging in this
particular field.) Contributions are welcome. See the web site for my
contact info. I will be updating it as information arrives.
July 11, 2007
Alexander v. Below has contributed a version of
StonerView as a MacOSX screensaver.
There was one of those already, but now it's a universal binary,
and the source code is available as a modern-style Mac XCode project.
July 4, 2007
And a
review
of the second Uru episode, "A New Light". (Which is Episode 6, to
reduce future confusion.)
May 31, 2007
My
review
of Uru's first monthly story episode, "Scars".
May 6, 2007
Hymn to a Mad Scientist,
as would be performed by Gene Wilder if he'd ever heard of it or me.
I wrote this almost a year ago, in honor of the
Narbonic web-comic by Shaenon Garrity.
Why post it now? Because Shaenon Garrity included it in the comments
to today's
Narbonic rerun strip.
Thanks!
May 4, 2007
Over the past month or so, I have perpetrated a series of posts on the
Uru web forums:
Plum Lake.
Plum Lake is an Age which I have imagined. I am trying a variety of
ways to convey in, in the overall medium of a web forum. Consider:
I also have a
discussion
of how the third (the interactive one) played out.
May 1, 2007
Mini-review:
Safecracker 2
(more visibly titled Safecracker, but I already
reviewed
a game with that title).
April 23, 2007
Because it is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, I shall
repost
A Terror in Flesh.
In case you missed it the first time. A short story.
(See
here
for more of IP-STPD.)
April 3, 2007
I have set up a
boodler-general
mailing list. (Hosted at Sourceforge.)
Remember Boodler? That's my nifty
soundscape project. Boodler is over five years old, and it's time to wake
it back up. If you're interested, subscribe and see what's going on.
March 23, 2007
Mini-review:
Echo: Secrets of the Lost Cavern.
March 5, 2007
About me, for once...
Delightful Wallpaper has won the
2006 XYZZY awards
for Best Writing, Best Puzzles,
Best Individual Puzzle, and Best PC.
February 27, 2007
And finally, my complete review of
Uru Live.
This is the one written for newcomers to Uru. If you've been following
my occasional essays, you may also be interested in
Role-Playing in the
Cavern,
which I posted a couple of weeks ago.
(Yes, I have ongoing projects not related to Uru. Give me some time.)
January 31, 2007
More Uru hackery (yes, I'm wrapped up in it but good). I will be maintaining
change notices for the game. That
is, I'll be tracking new things and areas as they appear in the game.
And more interestingly, I have RSS feeds for these changes, in three
varieties: spoiler, no-spoiler (just tells you that something's new),
and location-only (tells you something's new and in what Age). You can
subscribe to these feeds with any RSS client, or add them as Livejournal
friends, or whatever amuses you.
January 22, 2007
I have updated my
Uru Live Ongoing Review
page with some essays I have written about the game's current and
(possible) future development. These were originally posted on the
Uru Live web forums.
January 4, 2007
My list of
books I bought in 2006
(plus a few more)
and what I thought of each one.
December 3, 2006
I have revised my old
Uru Newcomer's Guide and Answer Sheet.
The Uru Live relaunch is coming closer...
we hope... and they've started inviting players in for a new "Preview"
testing phase. (See the
Uru forums.)
This edition of the game is even more of a "throw the player in and watch
him sink" than the original -- no instruction manual at all -- so I have
written up answers to common newbie questions.
November 30, 2006
About time I put up my
reviews of the 2006 IFComp entries.
At least, the 17 of them that I played. (But excluding the one that
I wrote.)
November 17, 2006
A new IF game!
Delightful Wallpaper
has taken sixth place (and also Miss Congeniality) in the
Twelfth Annual Interactive Fiction
Competition. I entered it under the pseudonym "Edgar O. Weyrd",
so perhaps you played it weeks ago but didn't guess it was me. Or
perhaps you did guess.
November 4, 2006
I put up a page linking to my ideas on
rule-based programming
(for IF design). Most of these ideas exist as long posts on
rec.arts.int-fiction. I haven't tried to collect them or turn them
into a coherent presentation -- I'm just collecting links for
future use. Also, some links to related research papers and textbooks.
October 25, 2006
Quick adventure review for the fall season:
Keepsake.
Some good puzzles, some serious UI problems.
August 22, 2006
I did not see Snakes on a Plane. I did, however, make a
Snake Cake.
I don't do a web page every time I bake a cake, but this does count
as a cultural phenomenon.
August 13, 2006
After much procrastination:
Glk spec 0.7.0
and
Glulx spec 3.0.0.
These updates bring full Unicode support to Glk/Glulx. This will eventually
make
Inform 7
much cooler.
July 23, 2006
Yet another Tarot project:
Zarf's SVG Tarot.
This is a preview (only Major Arcana yet) of a Tarot deck I'm doing for
Volity Zarcana. No, the game doesn't exist
yet. But when it does, this will be the default Tarot deck.
June 26, 2006
Volity Werewolf is on-line and playable.
You need to download the Gamut client application, which is why this is
a link to the whole Volity web site. I am pretty psyched about this.
Volity works. People can play games.
June 5, 2006
Short review of
Fahrenheit
(a.k.a Indigo Prophecy).
I know, everyone else played it months ago.
June 1, 2006
I've finished my first Inform 7 sample:
A Handy Kit.
It's not a game; it's a reimplementation of the toolcase from
Spider And Web. (And therefore contains spoilers for the
early part of that game.) I wanted to discover how comfortable
Inform 7
is for complicated gadgets. Answer: pretty comfortable; I was able
to do everything I wanted to do. I didn't have to compromise or uglify my
code to work around weaknesses in the language. However, there are still
compiler bugs which I did have to work around.
May 5, 2006
Back to writing about me... we've felt for a while that Volity should have
a developer blog. Now Andy Turner has finished adding some blog software
to the web site. Behold
the Volity Developer's Blog.
It has a double handful of posts already -- I've been writing them for
a couple of months, actually, so I just had to post and backdate.
(Sorry about the enormous tooltips; we'll fix them soon.)
May 2, 2006
This page is usually reserved for Stuff Zarf Did. But I'm going to make an
exception for
Inform 7.
Graham Nelson, after three-ish years of work, has released a completely
new and brilliant text adventure development system. You've probably never
used anything like it. If you have used something like it, you
thought it was a cute toy and would never turn into a useable, useful
system. Well, here is my first I7 test game:
"Testcase" by Andrew Plotkin
The Kitchen is a room. The wand is in the Kitchen.
Instead of waving the wand, say "Fizzy sparks."
Before waving the wand, if the wand is not held, instead say
"You're not holding that."
That's the source code. Compile it and it runs. Now, consider this: the
natural-style code is just one of the advances of Inform 7.
There's also a kick-ass IDE (Mac and Windows currently, Linux coming),
and a semantic, rule-based world model which I cannot feasibly explain
in this margin. Mostly because I haven't wrapped my own head around it
yet.
April 30, 2006
Mini-review of the new
Tomb Raider
game. Mostly I'm discussing the way it uses a physics engine to construct
puzzles.
April 2, 2006
I haven't been posting about this, but there has been steady progress on
Volity,
and we are now ready to call the game-development framework a beta release.
By which I mean, there are libraries, documentation and sample code.
You can write a
game, and people will be able to play it. (The game-playing part of the
system has been in beta for a couple of months now.)
This represents a year's worth of work on my part and more than a year's worth
from the other Volity conspirators. I can confidently say that it is a good
system. If you have a multi-player, turn-based game -- card games,
board games, anything like that -- and you want to put it on the Internet
for people to play, check
Volity
out. Fast prototyping, playtesting, online promotion for a retail product,
or because you want to play your favorite game.
March 4, 2006
The April issue of Computer Games magazine has an article on interactive
fiction. As preparation for that article, the writer interviewed me (and
also Emily Short) via email. We both wrote long interview replies, which
were mostly cut from the article. For posterity:
the complete
interviews.
February 24, 2006
This will not be of huge general interest, but I have updated the
Blorb spec to version 2.0. Blorb is a
format for packaging resources (graphics and sound) for an IF game.
The new spec adopts Ogg (for compressed sound files), adds a "frontispiece"
chunk, and has some other sweet jaggery-pokery.
January 4, 2006
Slightly late (and sorry about the web server being down over the weekend):
my list of
all the books I read in 2005 and
what I thought of them.
It's not perfect, because I also read a large handful of library books, and
I probably bought some books that I didn't get around to reading.
But it's most of the stack.
1997 - 2005
What was new in previous years.
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