Embargo Lifted on Rosewood

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but I have been busy with a lot of things, such as graduating, writing papers, gathering data, writing chapters, freaking out, etc. But in the interim, somehow I found time to make a game. The game is called The House at the End of Rosewood Street, and I’m finally able to talk about it publicly. I actually finished the first version of the game in May, and finished the first release of the game in September, but I was unable to talk about it due to the fact that I had wanted to submit the game to the 19th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. Today, the voting is over (I placed 16th out of 35), so I can finally talk about the game without any worry of violating any of the competition rules about releasing the game publicly beforehand or pandering for votes.

Rosewood is an interactive fiction game that puts you through a week in the life of a handyperson for a quirky street where a mysterious figure has just moved in at the old, abandoned manor house for which the street is named. The game was an experiment in exploring the dense notions of the uncanny, the fantastic, and the abject, which are used to evoke horror to great effect in the cinema of the Weimar period of Germany.  I’m not going to say too much about the game here, as I’ve given it its own page where you can also play the game.

The game was written in Inform 7, a natural programming language for text-based games. A long time ago, I mentioned using Inform 7 for experimenting with design, and this was the first game I completed using it. I rather like my experience with Inform 7, and I’m already planning out my next game with it. It’s really easy to make something substantial in the system. It’s also good for making random text-generators to run on my phone (I made a random tabletop adventure generator in about three hours the other day). I recommend trying it out, though people who are used to programming in a symbolic language (like C++) might have a hard time adjusting to Inform 7’s natural language style.

What I’m Doing Right Now

To start things off, I figured that I would let people know what I’m working on right now.  My last post before my lacuna had a lot of information about all the projects I was trying to get done at that time.  I have finished two of them, but I haven’t worked on a number of them for a while.  There are reasons for this, but I will not go into them (it will become apparent soon, as the posts roll out).  I thought it would be nice to talk about what I’m doing this summer, even if it really doesn’t affect anyone but myself.