I’ve made a game, Invisible Parties. It’s a mid-sized piece of parser interactive fiction, and the most substantial game I have published to date. You can play it in-browser here, or download to play with an interpreter.
Two lovers, searching for one another across the multiverse, meet again a tangle where many worlds meet: but the tangle is a trap, primed for apocalypse, and they may not be able to escape together. Or at all.
(Or you could read Emily’s summary, which is rather better.)
Among other things, it’s an attempt at creating a Zelazny-like multiverse game; to revise damsel-rescue into something less sketchy; and to evoke a rich sense of setting. (It’s not my job to say how far these succeed. I’d love it if you suggested some answers.)
This is its 2.0 release, but I consider it the first proper release – the first one I’d be proud to show off. I didn’t talk up the 1.0 release much when it came out, because it wasn’t really in a shape for it. It was part of the Shufflecomp minicomp/game jam, which I was running, so promoting my own thing rather than the comp in general seemed a tiny bit gauche.
It didn’t earn a top-30% commendation in that comp, which was fair enough: there were some excellent games submitted, I had taken on a somewhat overambitious project given the time available, and the version I had time to cobble together was, at best, of early-beta quality, opaque and buggy. A lot of that has hopefully been fixed now; apart from numerous bug fixes, there is now a help menu and a good deal more in-game guidance for the player. It is still a very good idea to draw a map as you play, however.
I’ve made the source available to read, as I’d like to get into a habit of doing. I would recommend not reading it until you’ve reached a satisfactory ending, but that’s entirely your call.
