a l e x f a l k e n b e r g

Indie Games Con (IGC) 2007 is in Eugene, Oregon on Oct. 10-11th, hosted by GarageGames. From the IGC site:

Indie Games Con (IGC) is a fun, informal and informative gathering of independent game developers from around the world. IGC is designed to be a summit meeting of like-minded developers with the shared goal to focus on collaboration and building community. This is an unprecedented opportunity to meet other indie developers, professional guest developers, hardware manufactures as well as the GarageGames staff.

I’ve never been to this one, but friends and colleagues who have tell me it’s a great mix of information and fun. Registration is still open; if you’re (avail)able, check it out.

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The 13th annual interactive-fiction competition, IF 2007, is now underway. Voting is a bit involved, demanding a fair amount of your time, but totally worth it, in my opinion, if you’re into interactive fiction at all. Downloading the text-based games is entirely free, available via .zip or .torrent. There are 29 IF entries this year, so you can choose to be very, very busy indeed…

What is interactive fiction, you ask? Think early Zork, or any of the earlier Infocom games. Very imaginative, very detailed, and often very challenging. And always entertaining. Oh–and no graphics!

As both art and programming, interactive fiction has a very, very long history and legacy which continues quite strongly today. There is a lot of variety and material to choose from, be it playful roleplaying and puzzle-solving, or more deep and serious interactive prose.

There is plenty of software to get you going creating your own interactive fiction, too, like TADS, Hugo, and Inform, among others. I use Inform 7, personally (which is freely available). Inform’s latest version uses a fairly sophisticated natural language model to create IF, so you might write/’program’ something like this regarding your kitchen and refrigerator:

which then gives you this experience as the player:

Much more complex interactions are possible, of course…

There is a TON of info available online, if you’re interested in creating your own IF; rec.arts.int-fiction is also fantastic for support and discussion if you’re a Usenet/newsgroups person.

There is another Usenet group, rec.games.int-fiction, that’s more for people playing rather than developing IF. The easiest way to check out both groups is to use Google Groups.

The IF community is really great, willing to answer questions, offer suggestions, all ultimately toward helping to keep IF alive. Most if not all share their games and their code, too, so you can play their games, read their stories, and participate in their created adventures, or use their code to help you learn how to better your own.

If you’re interested in playing old Zork and other Infocom/Adventure International/etc text adventures/games, quite a few of them are available online to play, usually for free. A Google search should find quite a few of them for you. And again, you’re strongly encouraged to try to create your own sometime!

Happy Frotzing!

An alpha build of Flex Builder for Linux has been released by Adobe. Note that some features are still missing, it being an early alpha and all…

Get it here.

Palm’s CEO Ed Colligan announced today that they were killing the Foleo, which was just about to actually ship. Good riddance, I say!

I totally called the Foleo-will-die thing waaaay back when it was first announced. Like, instantly. It was never clear who they were really even targeting with it. As a hacked device running Linux or something, it might have been interesting, but given it’s intended purpose, the form factor was stupid, the limited functionality and performance was stupid.

It suffered immediately and most obviously from the “one more device to lug around” problem, all other issues aside. No one wants that. A device that adds to the PDA/phone/laptop bundle people already lug around, in a size somewhere between all of them? Just say no!

“What was Palm even thinking?” comes to mind as well…to get a completely ludicrous idea to even pass the proposal stage, I mean, not a lot of bright bulbs in the room at any of those meetings, apparently. And five years was wasted on this. Five. Ouch. And a cost of “less than $10 million dollars to our earnings”, according to Colligan. Ouch again.

So many bad ideas seem to get past what should be layer upon layer of review…how do such bad ideas get as far as becoming a real product?

And for Palm, which has needed to step up its game for some time now or be forgotten forever, this was a really giant waste of time and resources. What’s even more confusing is that Palm still apparently doesn’t seem to get why the Foleo was so stupid, because they’re planning a Foleo II:

Colligan:
When we do Foleo II it will be based on our new platform, and we think it will deliver on the promise of this new category.

Good luck with that, Ed…you and yours apparently really, really need it. But first, I think I’d hope you could you crank out some improved smartphones or something. Just sayin’.

What products have you seen or owned that made you think “how did this ever get past the first hurdles of any design process?”