Friday 2 October 2015

IFComp 2015: Wade's overspiel

The Interactive Fiction Competition of 2015 has begun. There are 55 entries. I want to congratulate the entrants for entering and I want to thank Jason McIntosh for organising.

The purpose of my overspiel is to say that I will be reviewing some of the entries this year. I will be doing it here in this blog. I will be reviewing titles which specifically appeal to me from the outset or which serendipitously take my fancy. Learn more by continuing to read this post.

* The cut below this line is a test to test whether Blogger's Jump Break feature prevents information from appearing on the Planet IF blog feed. If you've enjoyed this post so far, please click 'Read More' to continue to enjoy further informational reading on the topic of my overspiel –

WHO AM I?

If you are an IFComp author reading this, you might want a touch of provenance about who is writing these things. My name is Wade Clarke. In modern times I have produced the IF games Leadlight, Six, Ghosterington Night and Leadlight Gamma. I have entered IFComp twice, reviewed a lot of IF, tested IF games and produced cover art and music for them. I also helped to test two games for this year's competition; obviously I won't be reviewing either of them.

A POTTED HISTORY OF MY IFCOMP REVIEWING

In the years 2012, 2013 and 2014, I aggressively set out to review all competition entries. I succeeded in 2012, was stymied by technical and health troubles in 2013, and aborted the 2014 mission early because I suddenly had the chance to go on holiday.

Here in 2015, I'm simply not setting out to review everything. This should agree more with my highly variable constitution.

MY SPOILER POLICY

To be comprehensive, I figure I will block the significant body of each post from appearing automatically by using the Cut feature. A person reading Planet IF should see a post name, the fact that it's a review and maybe an intro paragraph. If you click the Read More of any of my posts you acknowledge you will be completely exposed to any potential spoilers!

That said, I will probably present most reviews in such fashion that a reader can get some info from the head of the review without entering explicit spoilerdom. But I never guarantee that's what I'll do.

CONTACTING ME

To email me, visit wadeclarke.com then click the 'contact me' button on the bottom of any of its pages. This minor hoop you need to jump through is just to keep spambots at bay. If you're a game author writing me about a review, you should email me rather than posting a public comment in this blog. You don't want to break any IFComp rules!

4 comments:

  1. How did you code so that Planet IF would break directly to your Blog. I inserted a jump break into my first review, and although the jump break works correctly on my own blog, it did not work at all on the Planet IF feed.
    http://dougegan2.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Doug. It's something I fumblingly just worked out today after googling around. In Blogger, go to the 'Settings' section for your blog. It contains various sub-options - 'Basic, Posts and comments' etc. Of these, click the last one, 'Other'. This will reveal a 'Site Feed' section. The first option here is 'Allow Blog Feed.' Of the choices available for this option, you can choose 'Until Jump Break'.

    This change won't be reflected immediately on Planet IF, but should be reflected soon. I made sure it was on by leaving my 'Spiel' post up with its jump break in it until I was able to go to Planet IF and see the 'Read More' line had appeared in the post there at the relevant point.

    ReplyDelete
  3. While we're asking technical blogger questions, is there a comments feed available?

    ReplyDelete