IFComp 2010: Complete!
As I mentioned in my last post, a month and a half ago, I wouldn't be blogging the comp. That's because I entered: my entry, Flight of the Hummingbird, ended up placing 8th - and against extremely respectable competition. I'm pleased.
I've also written a complete set of IFComp10 reviews and posted them at my main IF site. I'm mostly wearing a pretend judge hat for them.
As for the comp as a whole? A lot of reviewers observed that this was a year of mostly unassuming competence, and general solid polish, but that there were no wild, mad experiments. I agree with the first few points, but will disagree a touch with the final one.
As for the first part, I was far from the only person to think that no games rated a 1 this year, and this is the first year since detailed breakdowns have been kept that absolutely no games got a modal score of 1 (that is, every single game got more of some other score than they did 1s). The winner, Aotearoa, did not get a single rating under 5, and has the lowest standard deviation in scores in any top-ten game since standard deviation has been recorded. Meanwhile, take East Grove Hills, which placed fourth-to-last, and compare its raw scores against the 2008 competition, and it's at the 50th percentile exactly. (Its score puts it between #17 and #18 in a 35-game competition.) Even the low end this year always had something to recommend it, even if it was only Maniac Mansion nostalgia.
As for the final point... OK, sure, there was no Lost Pig this year, nor Violet, nor indeed even a Legion or a Delightful Wallpaper or a Deadline Enchanter. But to say this wasn't an experimental comp is to ignore a great deal:
- Aotearoa includes namable NPCs and extends the keyword/command hybrid play of Blue Lacuna.
- Oxygen includes strategically reactive NPCs in a general dilemma situation.
- The Bible Retold: Following a Star uses an unusual-for-IF mainline-plus-sidequest structure reminiscent of console RPGs to fit the main game in two hours while allowing a wide range of extra content to be available. It also shows off a wide variety of technical and parsing tricks.
- Its much smaller companion piece The Bible Retold: The Lost Sheep includes a WALKTHROUGH command whose output is computed on-the-fly from your current location and game state.
- R was fabricated from scratch with a new engine for creating Scott Adams data files.
- My own Flight of the Hummingbird was in large part an attempt to make platforming mechanics actually work in IF as IF (as opposed to, say, Sylenius Mysterium or the parody Metroid IF).
- Gris et Jaune is a hackneyed genre premise meticulously researched to the point that it is entirely unrecognizable as genre, and is instead a fantastic period piece. (This is one where you may want to hold off on this one until release 2, though.)
- Under, in Erebus's core mechanic has been seen in the IFComp before, but it was thinly implemented and basically useless. Erebus provides scores of possibilities and is packed with easter eggs for a game-space-exploration-oriented player. (A second release is in progress at the time of writing and drastically improves the user experience.)
- Leadlight is a vastly elaborate retrocoding project, and notable for this alone, despite also being an eminently playable RPG-style IF. (A post-comp 1.1 release is already out and recommended for people just getting to it.)
So, OK, fine, maybe there wasn't any mad IF science this year. But I'd say we managed a pretty solid set of scientific conference proceedings.