Miyazaki Teaches Us That Learning Is A Lifelong Metamorphosis; A Continuous Act Of Trying, Failing, Growing,

Hi! Hi!

So, the update is out. Details are on the WIP post at the COG forum.

Choice of Games Forum

Knights of Evallon (WIP) [Updated 23rd July 2022]

Introduction: Hello, I am Thomas. Knights of Evallon is my first ChoiceScript game. I hope to make this a standalone game while leaving the

Thanks for the love and support!

Some days I just don't feel very eldritch.

Explore every corner of Tarragona.

You were drawn to its black walls, not by choice but obligation. Rafael hides like a needle inside the massive pile of hay that makes up the coastal city. Tension clings to each of its cobblestones, and eyes seem to watch you from every one of its corners. The ancient maps are somewhere within, you just need to follow their scent…

And try not to leave too deep a mark of your own.            

Play the Extended Demo!

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Reblog to save a Muslim

As you probably know, Punish A Muslim day is coming up on the third of April. Any Muslim who lives in England is in danger so please stay home. Don’t send your children to school. DON’T GO OUT on the 3rd of April. My non Muslim friends, please reblog this, one of your followers could benefit from it.

8 Different Types of Love

Eros- sexual passion and desire, generally considered as a loss of control, i.e., Cupid’s arrow with Troy and Helen causing the Trojan war. It’s an intense kind of love that is romantic and passionate, but not necessarily stable. In mature individuals as describe by Socrates it recalls youth, but when misguided it can be abused and indulged in. This love is centered around the body and our more selfish desires, and needs one of the other types of love to survive.

Philia- affectionate love, friendship, Plato felt love didn’t always need physical affection to be felt, hence the word platonic. Philia is what you feel between that friend you’ve had through hardships. It’s about the mind and loyalty rather than physical pleasure like eros.

Storge- familiar love, generally used to describe kinship, a love you feel for family, or those you view as family. It’s bound in our memories, and though storge is generally considering good, it can hold you back if members of you family have views that differ from yours in harmful ways.

Ludus- playful love. It’s what you feel in the honeymoon stage, or when you first start dating someone. The flirting, teasing, fun banter, and giddiness of love. It’s the emotional side of love that is unfortunately often neglected later in life.

Mania- this is when one lover becomes obsessive with the other, either due to insecurity or possessiveness. People who go through mania need love and are desperate to keep it and become jealous and controlling. This leads to unhealthy relationship with codependency issues.

Pragma-this love is enduring. It’s in couples who have been together for decades or friendships that have lasted just as long. Pragma is not the result of a search for love, but rather the effort of maintaining it. Pragma is for partners who have put in effort for each other, found resolutions that are best for each other, have invested in one another.

Philautia - loving yourself, the greeks defined this one under two categories a positive and a negative. It’s fantastic to love yourself to be confident in who you are, to have compassion for your being. This is not the self love described by narcissus which is vanity obsessed and greedy. This is a love for the person you are and who you will become.

Agape- this is love in its purest form, a kind of love that accepts and forgives and hopes for our success. It’s the kind of person you meet who has a never ending supply of empathy and compassion, and your always comfortable around. They are  agape with love.

Friend: Wanna hang out tomorrow?

Me: I actually performed an Activity yesterday. Please wait the three day recovery period to submit another inquiry

Welcome to The Rosebush

Welcome! We’re very happy to announce the preliminary launch of The Rosebush, a new online magazine for interactive fiction theory and criticism. The purpose of this preliminary launch is to let the interactive fiction community know that we exist, and to invite submissions. We hope to begin publishing early this summer, perhaps in June.

Learn more below, or you can also read this post on our website.

What is The Rosebush?

The Rosebush will be a free online magazine dedicated to publishing longer form articles about interactive fiction. The interactive fiction community already has well-established channels for reviews of individual games, and several people have well-read blogs, but we’ve been lacking a good platform for in-depth analyses, theory articles, discussions of craft, interviews, historical pieces, and so on. The Rosebush aims to be this platform. It will publish substantial articles that increase our understanding of interactive fiction, from individual works to design patterns, community structures and historical trends. The intended audience consists of both players and authors of IF.

What is the scope of the magazine?

Interactive fiction is a term with many uses. The focus of The Rosebush lies on digital works in which a player interacts with a pre-written story where text is the main medium. In particular, The Rosebush will publish about both parser-based and choice-based interactive fiction. While tabletop role playing games, computer role playing games, visual novels, and choose-your-own-adventure books are also interactive fictions in a sense of that term, they are not our primary topic.

Most of the organisers of The Rosebush come from the communities around the Interactive Fiction Competition, the Spring Thing, the IFDB, and so on; but we explicitly also intend to publish about the works of adjacent communities, such as the ChoiceScript community and the retro text adventure community.

What is the magazine looking for?

Articles! See the submissions page for the detailed call for articles. It is possible to either submit a pitch, which we will check to see whether the topic is suitable for The Rosebush, or an article. Links to submission forms can also be found on the submissions page.

What does The Rosebush offer authors?

Most importantly, a place for disseminating your articles. The Rosebush will maintain its website and ensure that all articles are also stored on the IF Archive, the best guarantee for perpetual availability in the current world of interactive fiction. In addition, the editorial team will work with you on your article, which can range from simple spelling/grammar editing to more substantial ideas and feedback on improving your piece.

The Rosebush is an entirely volunteer effort. There are no plans to offer a monetary compensation to authors of articles.

Who are we?

The editorial team currently consists of:

Aster Fialla (se/er)

Benjamin Slade (he/they)

Daniel Stelzer (they/them)

Drew Cook (he/him)

Josh Grams (he/him)

Kiana Lee (she/her)

Lisa Fox (she/her)

Mike Preston (he/him)

Mike Russo (he/him)

Victor Gijsbers (he/him)

Zee (they/them)

The Exile - Chapter Five, Part One

She's here... and she's a big one. This is easily the biggest chapter I've ever written in terms of variety, and honestly most of it is thanks to the fight scene alone.

I would highly recommend playing through a few times with some different commanders (if you have more than one)! There are some big secrets to be found this chapter >:3

Note to Code Divers.

We're at the point where the plot is beginning to thicken up and a lot of interweaving stories are going to be introduced.

By code diving you'll spoil the game to yourself (obviously). And, obviously, the game is meant to be played through blind. While I can't control what you choose to look at or spoil for yourself, I do ask that you keep yourself from spoiling the story for others.

This means do not share "sensitive/spoilery" code with others and do not use the code for your public theories. Because at that point it's not really a theory-- it's just spoiling the game.

Thank you!

Avg. Play length: 90k -> 114k Total Wordcount: 530k -> 818k

Read Below!

Trigger Warnings - There are no new trigger warnings. However, Chapter 5 starts with an incredibly graphic and emotionally intense scene.

Note: You'll have to play from the beginning. Your save files may still be there, but there's a high chance they won't work with the new chapter. Start from the beginning. Save yourself the pain. 😔

Play Chapter 5!

(Send bugs to my tumblr inbox or report them in the discord #bug-report channel. Either one works! And yes, there will be a lot of them 🙃)

h o w t o s u r v i v e c o l l e g e

Sleep

Okay listen - I know what you’re thinking. College students don’t sleep, though! And guess what? That’s absolutely true. I’ve had two cups of coffee today already and it’s only noon, but you need to learn how to sleep enough. Your body has limits and you need to learn what those are. I have had multiple friends who have fainted from not sleeping enough and guess what? They don’t perform better on tests that way. Figure out how many hours of sleep you need to get to function well. For me it’s about 5-7 hours per night during the week and about 7-8 hours per night on weekends (and I don’t have Friday class so Thursday nights count as weekends for me). This is probably the limit for keeping yourself healthy enough to function and I subsist off of coffee. If you don’t sleep you are going to get sick and your papers are going to be incoherent and you are going to gain weight from over eating. So just put down that paper, get your 6 hours and start up again in the morning. For majors that are reading based (i.e. English, History, Philosophy, Classics, etc) it is so important to get enough sleep so that you can actually comprehend your readings!

Plan

Your planner does not have to be beautiful, covered with script handwriting and cute small artist stickers to be worth putting time into (more power to you if yours is though — that’s a whole mood). I used Hobinichi Cousin planner to plan my day—chores, homework, and meals—but I also use iCal and an app called Things. My freshman year I thought that just having a paper planner would be fine but it did NOT work out for me. I was always late/forgetting meetings and running around like a chicken with her head cut off. Once I downloaded Things (for my assignments) and inputted work, social events, and when I’m really busy sleep/meals into iCal, I started getting better grades. Take 2 hours to plan. Seriously even if you have 372 things to get done by tomorrow, if you plan and make a linear list of the things you need to get done they will get done better and faster.

Things is a paid app. $10 for phone, $50 for Mac. It’s a bit of an investment for both but I have used it every single day for the past 2 years.

Socialize

Just me here with your local reminder that socialize does not mean you have to party. Let me tell you something, I haven’t gone to a party this entire year (it’s second semester) and I feel completely content about it. I am not saying that going to parties is bad. A lot of people have a ton of fun doing that, but let me tell you something—your social life cannot subsist off of parties alone. Invite people to brunch, make friends with the people in your classes by literally just talking to them (!!!), go on coffee dates with your friends as much as you can, take midnight ice cream runs, 1 am fried chicken runs, 9 pm boba study breaks, invite people over to make cookies, go to the cinema. Deep conversations and long talks will sometimes distract you from your work and guess what? That’s okay. That’s an important part of college too. Don’t shut yourself up in your room all day studying every day of the week. You are going to burn out. You need your friends and they need you!

Work smarter and harder

I cannot say this enough—utilize your resources! Go to office hours. It will literally save you to have a relationship with your professor. Not only are you going to get letters of recommendation, extensions when you really need them, and helpful tips—you can have amazing conversation and insight about grad school, research, and jobs. Go to the library. Not only are there a million books for your research project all grouped in the same section, but there are librarians who can help you find more resources with less effort. Use your databases, but also your own school’s archives. There is a reason we save so many books and newspapers. Also libraries are the absolute best place to study. This year I have tended to go to the most social floor because it keeps me awake and it reminds me that I have other people around me working late as well. Use apps. I’m saying this right now—DOWNLOAD ZOTERO. It will save you. It is an app and a google chrome extension which saves your sources in a database and then generates perfect citations/footnotes for your papers. It is the best thing of my life. Use google drive and keep your documents in organized folders. Organized virtual work is AS important as physical work. Also put some time into your LinkedIn ASAP—the sooner you do it, the easier it will be to keep it up to date.

Take care of yourself

Just be smart about your time and your mental health. Both of those I struggle with every day, but take solace in the fact that other people are going through it too. College is an amazing opportunity and even when it feels completely overwhelming it is still an extremely privileged position to be in. Do why you can to make yourself better, be there for the people who need you, grind on your papers and projects and research. At the end of the day your projects/papers are only going to be as good as your individual capacity allows them to be. Sometimes sleeping an extra hour is as beneficial as an extra hour of studying. Figure out what you need by making mistakes and forgive yourself! We are all just trying to make our way though.

Demo Update Chapter 2 Part 3

Chapter 2 Part 3 is now Live!

Demo

Have at it!

Shenanigans aside, as previously stated this update includes just over 170,000 words, which covers Peyton, Peidyn, Abelyn, and Anadora’s Romance, Platonic, and Friendship Routes (where you can still see their scenes without being on their specific path).

The update will have Broken your save files so make sure to start a fresh game.

Update Notes and Details Below:

There are now four accessibility settings, some old, a few new.

The Unicode Hints, and Panic Switch you should all be familiar with by now. The Script Display and Weights and Measures Switches, not so much.

There is a full explanation in the demo, but in brief:

The Scripts Display switch gives you the ability to swap between using Old English letters like the wynn Ƿ, and using the standard Roman Alphabet. It also changes the display of certain words to match their pronunciation with a British English accent. Since I'm well aware that only a minority of my readership have such an accent I've also included a rough transcript of each word using the IPA on each of the word's journal page.

The Weights and Measures switch allows you to switch between the in story measurements system and the metric system.

All the accessibility switches can be accessed at any point during the game from the Stats Screen Menu.

There are gaps present in the Stats Screen Journal Pages. I ran out of time and brain power before the release deadline -_-

I'll try and get a mini patch out by the end of the week to fix this.

I hope you all enjoy reading the new update, and as always feedback and bug reports are much appreciated.

Now, unless any major bugs emerge in the next 30 minutes or so, I'm off to collapse in a heap.

Have fun everyone!