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I tried For a Change very briefly, it is very interesting. The writing is intriguing. I'll have to play it more seriously.

Dan Schmidt, by the way, worked in the game industry, at Looking Glass Studio, a name I'm sure many slashdotters are familiar with. He has a great anecdote about commenting code here:

How not to comment code (Ultima Underworld example)
http://www.dfan.org/writing/comment.html

I recently read "Twisty Little Passages" ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262134365/ ) by Nick Montfort which despite its horribly self-consciously academic approach (it's all about developing a "theory" of IF for lit. crit. purposes) still has some interesting sections about the history of IF and comparing the various approaches to the field against each other.

It also introduced me to my favourite work of IF, "For a change" by Dan Schmidt, which is really proof that the genre has more to offer than you might have expected. He's a genius, and it's beautiful.

Give it a go online here: http://paperstack.com/for_a_change/ (requires Java) or download the ZCode files from Dan's site: http://www.dfan.org/IF/

Dan Schmidt also used to work there, and has entered the IF competition in the past (see this). Looks like he donated some prizes this year.

Has anyone else with pro game dev experience written IF?

Dan Schmidt also used to work there, and has entered the IF competition in the past (see this). Looks like he donated some prizes this year.

Has anyone else with pro game dev experience written IF?

Here are a few modern, independently-written Interactive Fiction games that match or beat anything Infocom has produced:

Photopia (scroll down)
Metamorphoses
For a Change
Babel
Worlds Apart

For lots more, head over to The Best of IF.

How pleased I am to see IFComp finally mentioned on Slashdot! I know people in the IF community have been trying to have this happen for at least the past couple of comps. I hope that this will help to not only generate more IF players, but also authors.

One that note: I see folks have mentioned 'em, but nobody has done the service to the truly lazy and linked to 'em, so allow me then then to list off some favorite sophisticated interactive fiction authorship engines:

Inform, based on the parser Infocom used in its games (as of the late 80s), is a fully object-oriented language with a C-like syntax. It's my personal language of choice for the little bit of IF dabbling I've done; you can see the source for a small and silly game called 'Calliope' I wrote for last year's competition (I came in 23rd, heh (but I got to win an Honest Bob CD anyway, hurrah)) linked from my own IF info page(which also has the compiled game, and links to lots of other modern IF games (much better than mine!) and authors I like). Inform is also open-source, and binaries exist for any platform you might reasonably care to name.

There's also TADS and Hugo, about which I know little, but are both popular enough with other authors to be worth checking out for the interested newcomer.

Have fun!
J
MacOS Open Source