phildini.dev
Homage for the Holidays: from Portland get XOXO
This is the first Homage for the Holidays project. It may help to read the previous blog post for context.
Let’s follow the logic train on this one. XOXO was awesome, and inspired me to want to do projects not for fame or money, but just because they were interesting to me and hopefully pushed the envelope in some way. I started by looking at what the organizers, Andy Baio and Andy McMillan, had done previous to and alongside XOXO for inspiration. Digging through Andy Baio’s profile, I found his work with Inform 7, and Playfic.
Briefly: Inform 7, often shortened just to Inform, is a language and tool for creating and running interactive fiction. If you think you don’t know what interactive fiction is, think back to really old text based games - “go north you are eaten by a grue” type stuff. Playfic is a site where you can run and play interactive fiction works in a web browser. Playfic was created by Andy Baio, because he wanted to — well, I’ll let him tell it:
Andy loves interactive fiction and wanted to make a game, but found it to hard to share his work-in-progress online. In an epic tale of yak shaving, he built Playfic before writing his first game.
From the PlayFic Website I deeply empathized with this level of yak shaving, and Playfic/Inform seemed like a great way give homage to one of the people who had inspired me. Additionally, in my head Inform and I had unfinished business. If my education had gone according to plan, I would have taken a course on interactive fiction (a subject that really excites me) and spent three months doing a deep dive into Inform. My school career didn’t exactly follow a linear path, so I never got a chance to play with Inform.
Until now.
Here is what I have done, although started may be a better word. I have rebuilt, as much as possible, the XOXO 2014 experience in Inform 7, hosted on Playfic.
The project is called “from Portland get XOXO”.
Is it finished? Nope, although I’ll be working on it more this week, and posting updates when I can. What is there is the bones, including pretty much every major location and most of the events from the four days of fun.
What would I like to happen? Well, mostly I want people to play it. And have a reaction to it that hopefully isn’t boredom. I also want people to change it, make it better, make it crazier, basically take what I’ve done as a base and push the limits of it.
So I’ve put the whole thing in a github repo, and I am actively soliciting issues and pull requests. Anyone who contributes will get my eternal thanks, and a call-out on twitter plus this blog.
Play it, have fun with, and make it your own.
Thanks, and look for more updates about the project this week, plus more Homage for Holiday posts in the coming weeks
xoxo homage-for-the-holidays projects