For two years running, Sam Kabo Ashwell has done a heroic job organizing per-category reviews of the previous year’s XYZZY Award-nominated works of interactive fiction, written by authors of prior award-winning games. This year it took the form of a blog, with one writer’s take on a single award category’s nominees rolling out every day over the course of several weeks. Sam posted the final summary on Monday, linking to all the past posts by reviewer and category.

I managed to write four reviews, all covering the 2012 nominees for Best Implementation. I found an interesting challenge in not reviewing the games as whole works, as I normally would, but instead examining them in light of their epitomizing — according to the greater IF community — how a well-implemented text game ought to play. In at least one case this directive let me to write a rather crabby review of a game that I actually quite enjoyed playing, as I found myself rather disagreeing with the community about that particular game’s strongest aspects. I’ll leave it to you to read more about that, if you wish.

I thought the project worked quite splendidly, both as a reviewer and especially as a reader and player, and I look forward to reading more next year. But well before then, I look forward to returning to read many of these reviews, whose mere presence has moved me to queue up and belatedly play a bunch of these 2012 games first. I very much expect I’m not alone here, and that thought does please me.

Yes, I'm late. Sorry -- it's still the weekend, isn't it?

Six puzzle barriers, and the map traversal code that goes along with them. As I said back in... when was I working on ritual shortcut code? November? Anyway, a lot of this game has turned out to be "Implement a thing! Now implement it again, in the more-convenient shortcut which is available once the player knows how to do it!"

Then, in some cases, you implement it a third and fourth time, for when the player discovers an alternate solution and starts using that.

I am moderately terrified of bugs -- any mismatch in the implementations is going to cause plot holes. In normal programming, you'd have a single implementation underneath and call it from two (or four) places, but sadly that approach doesn't make sense here. So I do acres of testing and sweat a lot.

(The latter only slightly because the temperature in Boston zoomed up to 90 this weekend. Cold front tomorrow, which should help, if the accompanying thunderstorms don't knock over my power.)

I'm afraid I don't have any other exciting news for May. I spent a lot of time on Secret Project STW-5, which is just the coolest thing in the world but not ready for any kind of public display yet. (It is IF of a sort, but not parser-based.) I am hopeful that I can start limited alpha-testing in the next couple of weeks, so I may have more to say about it next month.