Interactive fiction is a kind of interactive text roleplaying game, something I have always found a bit fascinating. For a long time, Graham Nelson’s Inform was the state of the art for creating these things. Of course, there wasn’t a lot going on in that field since text games are kinda passe, and I myself thought that Inform was dead too. Just going its job as well as always, but the last improvement in the field.
Turns out I was wrong. Inform 7 has now been released. To write an interactive fiction game in this version you actually work with natural language in the background. You write stuff like, ‘West-wing is a room.’ and the places appear in the game.
Pretty cool. In related news Slashdot has something up about another new Interactive Fiction invention here.
Alexander has banded together with his friend of many years, Viktor Petersson, to create a new internet startup. You may read about its development at the Playing With Wire blog.
We didn’t have a lot of stuff to put here on Norwinter.com. Currently, Olov is spending most of his days in San Francisco working through tough classes at the Academy of Art University. The current gig is a roto scoping project involving Planet of the Apes and featuring the awe inspiring acting of Alexander.
Speaking of Alexander, he is buried in work with a couple of university classes sprinkled on top. What a life.
Alright. As mostly Konkret users noticed, the website went down over the weekend again. The server began crashing intermittently and nobody knew why so we did the only right thing. We switched to a new server. So in the future all these mysteriously-disappeared-Norwinter problems will be gone, hopefully!
P.S.
Expect some additional downtime as we perform minor upgrades to the new server. They shouldn’t be long.
Since we started counting, Konkret has now rolled over 10,000 rolls! Konkret might not be the most visited website in the world but 10,000 is sure a pretty big number anyhow for an RPG dice rolling utility.
We have been thinking. Because of all the noise on the internet, with commercial spamming and too many unfinished tiny projects, it is pretty hard to promote an independent game these days. Maybe it is time to create a new website for indie game promotion. Put in some fancy voting system. Reduce the noise by only allowing finished and user verified games. It would be like the now apparently defunct DIY Games (which by the way had a sneak peek at Bouncy Hunters two years back), or like a complement to Mad Monkey.
If Norwinter does anything with this idea we’ll be sure to let you know here.
You guys seem to like Konkret – since I posted the 1000th roll post we’ve had an additional 500 rolls!
In our never ending quest to make Konkret the fanciest web roller ever, we have gone ahead and implemented some handy new World of Darkness features: the new revision system with a fixed target of 8 where 1s don’t count against you. We also tossed another requested feature in there: 10 Again. This rule somehow never made it onto the first revisions of Konkret but now not only 10 Again is there but we went all the way with 9 Again and 8 Again too. In any combination. Its hot, we know.
As always, Konkret Dice lives here.
