#if craft

[the-rosebush-mag]

Parser Poetics in Portrait with Wolf

by lavieenmeow

image credit: Callie Smith

Drew Cook’s Portrait with Wolf, a back garden entry in the 2025 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction, bears the tagline “a different kind of IF art show.” The game explores themes of mental illness, abuse, health care, childhood, creativity, control, and pursuit. It is part parser, part poem; while at the same time being neither parser nor poem. Portrait with Wolf is something completely original.

"Parser Poetics in Portrait with Wolf" is lavieenmeow's way of figuring out what Portrait with Wolf is doing and what makes it effective. As well, the article hopes to identify some possible characteristics of a “parser poetics”, and encourage even more discussion of Portrait with Wolf, in order to lead to more production of experimental work in the tradition of the IF Art Show.

Read the full article on The Rosebush.

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[the-rosebush-mag]

Studies of ZIL, Part 2: How Does ZIL Work Anyway

by Max Fog

ZIL: Zork Implementation Language. Used by Infocom for their wide range of well-known games, including classics such as its namesake, Zork, as well as Trinity, Plundered Hearts, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In the previous article in this series, I studied how the Z-machine – a virtual machine compiled from ZIL code – evolved from its first version, z1, through to z6, with new capabilities added all the time amidst market competition. I examined the improvements made from z-machine version 3 to 5, including colors, status lines, file size, and finally – due to increases in RAM and file capacity, as well as more complex capabilities – the release of the new-parser of version 6. This included the ability to reference objects from other rooms, and style more complex input structures – such as three objects in one command, a feat I accomplished for my debut game, Milliways: the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. In the following articles, I will be writing about my personal experiences in coding the 2023 IFComp game, Milliways: the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. But for you to understand anything I say, I’m going to have to teach you how ZIL works first.

Read the full article on The Rosebush.

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[the-rosebush-mag]

Behind "The Bloody Wallpaper":

Designing Fallen London’s 100th Exceptional Story

by Chandler Groover

In “The Bloody Wallpaper” the player is conscripted to work in a luxury hotel for a single evening. But menial labor isn’t famous for being fun, and “The Bloody Wallpaper” is premium DLC for an online game: it needs to be fun, doesn’t it? In this article, Chandler Groover discusses the design of gameplay meant to evoke the frustration of menial labor without being frustrating.

Read the full article on The Rosebush.

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[the-rosebush-mag]

Game Design Lessons Learned Trying to Write a Cento

by Hugo Labrande

What if you wrote a parser game using only sentences taken verbatim from other parser games? Like a cento for text adventures?

Read the full article on The Rosebush.

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