interactive fiction for profit and fun

[jazzfish]

Way back on Monday I was going to point people to how Zarf is trying to raise enough money to write IF full-time... but then he did, in under twenty-four hours. So, um, go Zarf. And feel free to give him more money so he can write more IF, and snag some cool bonuses for yourself! I, for instance, will have my name in the game as an ancient alchemist or alchemical formula, which I'm kinda chuffed about. (I'm assuming he's going to ask everyone "so, um, what is your name?" so I can make sure there's a Jazz Fish in there somewhere. That ought to be easy.)

Speaking of IF, if you're localish to me and haven't yet seen GET LAMP, Jason Scott will be screening it at UMD next Monday at seven. I think I can just about get there in time for that, assuming I can navigate the campus. Anyone else interested?

Comments

[rbandrews]

Wow, I would absolutely love to do that. Maybe something like "pledge up to $500 and I'll write [some game idea], and give you a copy, and the tools I used to make it." That would actually motivate me to finish a game and release it in such a way as to make money form it.

I doubt I know enough people to clear anywhere near $16k though, not even the amount I would need to be full time. Not to mention, I don't really want to do anything but this full time, until I finish this. I actually think that what I'm writing at work is important to have on the market.

[jazzfish]

Kickstarter is a brilliant idea, but it still suffers from the curse of requiring marketing. Different marketing, to be sure, and sometimes marketing that gets done for you (yay word-of-mouth), but still marketing.

In Zarf's case, he's an established brand. He's been doing this for nearly thirty years. And I gather that he's /not/ doing anything terribly important or interesting at work.

I sort of regret that my chosen field doesn't lend itself at all well to this sort of thing. Then I remember that that's because the barriers to entry are already about as low as they can possibly get, and Kickstarter's about dropping those barriers.

[rbandrews]

Established brand is one thing, although I would rather he work full-time on either making Boodler more awesome, or on making the tool he used for the tarot deck release-worthy, as I personally find those cooler than his IF. But his IF is cool, and I'm glad he is getting to work on something he wants to build full-time.

For that matter, it would be really cool if he made his game using the rule-based system he talked about before, and then released the compiler. It would be a fun thing to play with.

Another thing keeping me from doing this is that what I want to make are tools that let non-programmers (particularly kids) learn how to write programs, for a lot of reasons that I sound like a crazy person when I talk about. However, kids don't have credit cards, and people who do aren't interested in giving money to people who don't have PhDs in education. And, even if you do have the requisite serious-educator credentials, nobody wants to buy your product, they want to fund your research, which I'm not all that into.

So I write what I want and use it myself, and fund it by writing things that let people drill really deep holes safely. Which is arguably more important anyway.