Recent Posts

41

General Discussion / Submit to sub-Q!

« Last post by dacharya64 on October 08, 2015, 07:15:03 PM »

Hey there!

I'm here to talk about sub-Q, a new literary magazine for interactive fiction! We are up and running now, and are currently accepting submissions! sub-Q pays authors and developers for original work and reprints made in any of the various IF tools out there.

We are primarily looking for works of speculative fiction (fantasy, sci-fi, horror, or genre-bending) but are open to seeing what you've got. You can find out more about sub-Q by checking out our submission guidelines here: https://sub-q.com/about/submissions/

Thanks for your time, and looking forward to seeing your work!

42

Announcements / (Closed) Hiring: Game Writer (Paid, PT, 4+ months)

« Last post by Chris on September 12, 2015, 09:56:29 PM »

(Accepting applications until 9/18/2015)

Are you the next Christine Love? Jon Ingold? Ron Gilbert? Can you show a reader a rollicking good time? Can you create a compelling story to help bring a game to life and suck in the reader?

Adventure Cow is working on a new experimental project. The appetite for BioWare-style games is HUGE. And a huge percentage of BioWare’s fans play for the story, the characters, and the romance. These fans paint their own tarot cards, draw their own comics, and write their own fanon. One game every two years is not enough.

They want more, and we’re going to give it to them.

Imagine the challenging choices and compelling characters of a Dragon Age or Mass Effect…in a book. Call it an RPB. We need a talented game writer to make it fun!

Time commitment:
20 hours/week, ASAP through January 2016 with opportunity for extension

Compensation:
Dependent on experience

What you'd be up to:
You will work with a small writing team to produce an interactive F/SF novella (12K words of reader experience, up to 60K words of total prose) over the course of four months, meeting milestone deadlines to ensure delivery. You will need to develop compelling, fast-moving plot to bring the characters to life and make the game exciting.

You should be able to use story to solve game design problems, and game design to solve story problems. You should be comfortable with sharing narrative responsibilities, making a case for your plot choices, and being open to compromise.

This is a new frontier. We’ll be drawing the map together.

What we're looking for:

• 2+ years writing F/SF
• Experience playing story-driven games (Bioware, Telltale, etc.) and/or interactive fiction
• Comfort adopting new technology
• Ability to communicate complex ideas
• Experience reporting bugs
• Advanced imagination
• Advanced problem-solving skills
• Sense of humor

Also highly welcome:

• Experience designing story-heavy games
• Publication credits (either games or fiction)
• Publishing industry experience (either games or fiction)
• Software development/scripting experience (e.g. Python, HTML5/JS/CSS, AJAX/JSON/MongoDB)

How to apply:
Contact us directly via email (chris [at] adventurecow.com). Please include:

• Resume or CV with full name and contact info
• Details of any previous projects, if applicable
• Three samples of your work, in any combination of the below (from three different creative works, please):
  
  Links to your published fiction
  Links to your text-based games
  1000 word samples of your creative writing (pasted into body of email, no special formatting needed)
  

43

Announcements / (Closed) Looking for: 5 primary game testers

« Last post by Chris on September 10, 2015, 01:45:41 PM »

Adventure Cow is looking for 5 testers to test our new book. Imagine if a game like Dragon Age or Mass Effect were made into an interactive novel. Adventure Cow is working on a project to do just that, but we need a small cadre of testers to try it out and tell us when we're doing great, and when we're doing terrible.

What you'd be up to:
You should have some time about twice a week to play our game and talk to us about it. That will probably translate into 30 minutes twice a week. It won’t matter exactly when it is! You should just be able to try out our prototypes for a few minutes every so often and let us know what you think.

What we're looking for:
Enthusiastic about games and available to talk regularly
Looking for someone in each of these hats: Visual novel nerd, Bioware game nerd, sci-fi/fantasy fiction devourer. If you don't wear any of them but would love this type of game let us know and we'd probably have a spot!

44

Announcements / Hiring: Game Designer (Paid, PT, 4+ months)

« Last post by Chris on September 10, 2015, 01:27:26 PM »

(Updated: We're reopening the call for applications until 10/16/2015!)
(UpUPdated: We've changed the what we're looking for section)

Are you the next Sid Meier? Shigeru Miyamoto? Can you take your knowledge of game mechanics and RPGs, and use it in a radically different medium...the book? Can you give a reader a rollicking adventure, with interesting puzzles and choices, through words?

Adventure Cow is working on a new experimental project. The appetite for BioWare-style games is HUGE. And a huge percentage of BioWare’s fans play for the story, the characters, and the romance. These fans paint their own tarot cards, draw their own comics, and write their own fanon. One game every two years is not enough.

They want more, and we’re going to give it to them.

Imagine the challenging choices and compelling characters of a Dragon Age or Mass Effect…in a book. Call it an RPB. We need a great game designer to help us make this book fun to play!

Time commitment:
5-15 hours/week, ASAP through January 2016 with opportunity for extension

Compensation:
Dependent on experience

What you'd be up to:
You will work with a small writing team to produce an interactive F/SF novella (12K words of reader experience, up to 60K words of total prose) over the course of four months, meeting milestone deadlines to ensure delivery. You will need to articulate strong game mechanic ideas to the team and work together to execute them.

You'd be in charge of building the interactions that make our game compelling. We need interesting core mechanics that are easy to write and don't require wallrunning or bullet time. We're writing a book!

You should be able to use story to solve game design problems, and game design to solve story problems. You should be comfortable with sharing narrative responsibilities, making a case for your design choices, and being open to compromise.

This is a new frontier. We’ll be drawing the map together.

What we're looking for:

• 2+ years designing story-heavy games
• Familiarity with interactive fiction tools (Twine, RenPy, Inform, inkleWriter)
• Comfort adopting new technology
• Ability to communicate complex ideas
• Experience reporting bugs
• Advanced imagination
• Advanced problem-solving skills
• Sense of humor

Also highly welcome:

• Game industry experience
• Software development/scripting experience (e.g. Python, HTML5/JS/CSS, AJAX/JSON/MongoDB)

How to apply:
Contact us directly via email (chris [at] adventurecow.com). Please include:

• Resume or CV with full name and contact info
• Details of any previous projects, if applicable
• A sample of one of your previous games, with design aspects you worked on highlighted
• Answer to the following question:
  You have been tasked with redesigning DestinyQuest Infinite to reach a more general audience. Based on the demo link here, how would you suggest updating the game, specifically the mechanics?
  

We're especially interested in the last two. Thanks!

45

Announcements / Hiring: Game Marketing/PR consultant (Paid, PT, 4+ months)

« Last post by Chris on September 10, 2015, 01:03:33 PM »

(Updated: Accepting applications until 9/23/2015)

Adventure Cow is working on a new experimental project. The appetite for BioWare-style games is HUGE. And a huge percentage of BioWare’s fans play for the story, the characters, and the romance. These fans paint their own tarot cards, draw their own comics, and write their own fanon. One game every two years is not enough.

They want more, and we’re going to give it to them.

Imagine if a game like Dragon Age or Mass Effect were made into an interactive novel. Adventure Cow is working on a project to do just that, but we need help getting the word out!

Compensation:
Dependent on experience

What you'd be up to:
You'll be helping us tell the world about our story. We're a team of game designers, programmers, and creatives working on something very new, but we need to reach the right audience! We're looking for an initial audience of a thousand readers, and our aim is to get 100k to eventually read our interactive novel.

What we're looking for:
The ideal person will be:

• Enthusiastic about story-driven games, in particular modern Bioware-style RPGs and story-driven Telltale-style adventure games.
• Have a gift for telling stories. If you can listen to me blabber for five minutes and then give our elevator pitch better than I can, that’s perfect.
• Well-connected in the right places. Our audience likes sci-fi/fantasy books and also games with lots of story and personality, and we're a bridge between the book and game worlds. If you know people who have our audience's ears, that's awesome.
• Available. This is probably a four month PT project, and if you’re good at what you do, that four months will probably turn into a year.

How to apply:
Contact us directly via email (chris [at] adventurecow.com). Please include a resume and some examples of previous work (projects promoted).

46

DestinyQuest Infinite / DestinyQuest Infinite 2.4 - Latest Updates (April 11, 2016 Changelog)

« Last post by Chris on July 03, 2015, 02:46:57 PM »

Update: If you visited this page earlier today, you may have noticed the 2.4 version updates had disappeared! We had the bad luck to update the site at the same time that our webhost shut it down and restored a backup.

Here is a list of fixes and updates for the latest versions of DestinyQuest Infinite. You can also look at the roadmap to see what's coming up.

DestinyQuest Infinite 2.4 (April 11, 2016)
Some new bug fixes, thanks to our sharp-eyed players. Thanks for your help!

• 509: (Thanks Alziel!) Spider's leg doesn't work as a valid potion ingredient
• 507: Description missing for 'Spirit Tincture' reward (Entry 794 in the book); ability not available in combat
• 506: (Thanks Mike!) Pickpocket career popup shows up repeatedly after first page on which it appears
• 504: (Thanks Mike!) Act II Arena gold reward missing
• 503: (Thanks Mike!) Seared Scar quest not properly tracking potion-give
• 502: (Thanks Mike!) Avian Dale conversation text missing
• 508: (Thanks Alziel!) Brain Drain ability implemented improperly
• 513: (Thanks Alziel!) Shield Wall effect should only last for one round
• 512: (Thanks Alziel!) Arthurian's Horn can be used more than once, crashes game if enemy health goes negative
• 511: (Thanks Alziel!) Inquisitor _____ will offer to _____ you the __________ ______ after the Act 3 Blue Quest, even if he died

DestinyQuest Infinite 2.3 (October 29, 2015)
Some additional bug fixes, based on player feedback.

Bug fixes:

• 491: Crown of Command jewel bonuses not reported when taking it
• 486: Page 471 (after page 412 + Dwarven Compendium then Continue) is blank
• 483: (Thanks Devi!) Shadow Fury and Vampirism don't show continue after use

DestinyQuest Infinite 2.2 (September 7, 2015)
This is the first official release of DQI with Act 3 support.

Bug fixes:

• 481: (Thanks Fergus!) Sound in Chrome >44.0.2403.89 is only on right channel
• 479: The link on the achievement "Rune Master" (p41) leads to a blank page
• 480: (Thanks Peter!) Can't continue if you don't give Hal a potion
• 350: Typo in combat log - "Scorpios do X damage"
• 473: If armor is reduced to 0 from locust attacks on page 764, reduced armor does not carry over
• 471: Lorcan fight doesn't list "Enchanted stone" among enemy abilities
• 475: Wreekin net ability now showing up in list on page 366
• 474: Arthurian's horn item has no use description and doesn't work
• 472: Error when using Riposte

DestinyQuest Infinite 2.1 (August 24, 2015)
After we released DestinyQuest Infinite 2.0 internally, we spent some time testing it and fixed some of the bugs, so you'll never see them.

Bug fixes:

• 213: Down the Well quest is called "The Well" in the table of contents
• 448: Surge ability has omitted word in combat usage text
• 461: Alternate path on page 895 requires Magic 24, but this isn't mentioned if requirement is met
• 454: Scarron fight shows achievement if you beat the top Scarron first
• 449: Alchemist ability Good Taste works on items that are not backpack items (Bracelet of power/Focus)
• 462: Combatants and win requirements on fight on page 921 not spelled out
• 439: Dark claw's verb conjugation is off if player's name is 'You'
• 465: Sentries fight (page 921): Ruse ability affects Sentries, not target
• 469: Status inflicted on the Spore Cloud monster in fight on page 924 doesn't go away when new cloud is generated
• 450: Enchanted Stone (939) not working against burn/embers
• 447: Ghoulish Gloop (2 uses) and Oil flask (2 uses) are not functional
• 453: Eureka ability not enabling select of attribute to increase
• 460: Fight on 924 has a special win goal that's not checked
• 463: Fight on page 921 not winnable
• 466: Shadow ranger career token is missing abilities
• 467: Some same-named abilities are not supposed to be independently usable
• 445: Alchemist's ability "Midas touch" broken
• 446: Broken images on page 802, 866
• 451: Icelock career token doesn't collect
• 464: Steal ability doesn't ask player which attribute to steal, doesn't work
• 452: (Thanks John!) Ice-buried chest (after Chilblain) cannot be opened

DestinyQuest Infinite 2.0 (July 23, 2015) (MAJOR RELEASE)
In preparing for Act 3, we made some major updates to the DQI engine. Read more here.

New features:

• 214: (Thanks Devi and Diego!) UX: Add the option to play through Act 1 again after you beat it
• 162: Muting intro music does not mute game music
• 007: UX: Show help text for speed icon during speed rolls
• 391: Item cards have icons that don't do anything but close the window, should show tooltips on hover
• 392: The SpecialAbilities list in combat should show a tooltip, similar to Speed, Brawn/Magic, etc.
• 235: UX: Unique events on repeatedly viewed pages should only show up once

Bug fixes:

• 271: (Thanks Morgan!) Contents of sidebar sometimes overflow on high resolution screens
• 276: Crown of Kings item is not removed from backpack once its quest is completed
• 244: (Thanks Tron!) Immunity text gets displayed twice for all enemies with immunities
• 287: Crown of Kings story displays inconsistencies if quest is unfinished or completed in certain ways
• 437: Can't pick up items on page 500 (and any page where a set macro makes the page go away after the first visit)
• 341: Game home screen not loading in Safari on private browsing mode
• 433: (Thanks Yves-Arnaud!) Fire grass not being added to inventory; hit invisible quest items maximum
• 110: Shadowstalker reroll appears at the wrong time (before first roll)
• 215: (Thanks Devi!) Save game date and time is not in the right time zone for most people
• 435: 30 coins are gained on page 401 for no reason
• 382: Combat shows enemies have 1 more ability than they actually do, if the battle has a custom script
• 312: When Laird is fighting ghouls, his special healing [xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
• 217: (Thanks Devi!) Hitting back button more than twice from any page results in error message
• 220: Dice rolling game in pub continues even without rolling the dice
• 427: Every 10 reloads or so, an error occurs on Firefox
• 275: Gladitorial Games option doesn't disappear from town in Act II once cleared
• 430: Page 428 will not load
• 269: (Thanks John!) Is it possible to combine Bolt, Overload, and Indigestion in fight with Angler?
• 432: Continue arrows are broken
• 250: (Thanks Tron!) Feint ability only allows one die to be rerolled
• 374: Silk cut is not recognized as a sword by Swordmaster
• 182: DQI Preview: Map icons aren't grayed out in IE
• 325: When an enemy is affected by multiple status effects, the second indicator appears behind the abilities icon
• 185: (Thanks Sean!) When site is restarting because of updates, there's no appropriate error message explaining what just happened.
• 383: Game play screen not loading in Safari on private browsing mode
• 316: Set piece fight on page 700 doesn't expose mechanics adequately
• 319: Styraxian Steed has two placeholder abilities.
• 305: Items "Home Brew" and "Stink Bomb" have missing abilities
• 318: Spore Bombs (1 use) has a placeholder ability
• 281: Trading herbs with Tanner doesn't let you have more than one of each type

DestinyQuest Infinite 1.3 (July 4, 2015)

• 257: Rogue pickpocket "take 20 gold crowns" option not working
• 278: Pickpocket skill activates on trading herbs in Tanner's shop
• 393: Combat: “Chris is rolling for speed” should read “Chris, roll for speed.”
• 371: Count/Countess fight broken
• 370: Fight with The Giant doesn't let you select Fire Sprites as targets
• 384: Combat with multiple enemies won't let you attack anyone but main enemy
• 321: addBonus only correctly applies bonus for main enemy; also, the visual shows +0 and empty box
• 299: Immunities don't work with abilities that cause damage at combat start

DestinyQuest Infinite 1.2 (May 1, 2015)

• 346: Safari demo doesn't play background music
• 295: Lansbury and Mathis fights shouldn't automatically give you ability
• 146: Dark Arthurian necromancers should not say 'Necromancer m'
• 285: Combat doesn't work (Roll button disabled) with a Mage/Medic
• 291: The option to trigger Iron Will appears at the wrong time
• 301: Broken image & italics on page 634
• 357: Shield spin does twice as many dice worth of damage as it should
• 344: Music not playing in beta demo
• 345: (1) Music in title screen doesn't come back if turned off and back on, (2) Music isn't playing during game except during combat.
• 356: If Cavalier retaliates and kills an enemy before you can roll for damage, the player can no longer do anything (game is stuck)
• 355: In fights with multiple enemies that all attack you, when one is defeated, it still rolls for damage
• 303: Using Shield Wall ability wrecks battle program
• 311: Field Medic ability not working in Gull portion of fight
• 218: Music stops playing after combat
• 148: Lansbury's shield should not be selectable in combat
• 147: Scarron fight broken (Avian's shield on the wrong side, and other related issues)

47

Twine / Re: How do I host my story?

« Last post by Chris on May 13, 2015, 01:12:50 PM »

You got a story to host?

48

General Discussion / Re: How to Write an Interactive Story - Proposal

« Last post by Chris on May 13, 2015, 01:10:59 PM »

Oh, by the way, I never went through with the interactive story discussion, but would love to get suggested articles to discuss!

49

General Discussion / Re: How to Write an Interactive Story - Proposal

« Last post by Chris on May 13, 2015, 01:09:42 PM »

Hey daizydenocows,

I don't know about that astrology site, but the writing site seems to be more like a link to interactive stories than instructions on how to write them.

Have you written any interactive stories? Would love to see.

Finally, you can change the picture in the Profile menu...I think.

50

General Discussion / Re: How to Write an Interactive Story - Proposal

« Last post by daizydenocows on May 12, 2015, 10:23:36 PM »

Okay the best thing to notice is astrology sites like this http://www.astrologyjunction.com/   how do they sound so interactive? like be super hyped up about it   here : http://www.writing.com/main/list_items/item_type/interactives just googled this, may help u, My advice is know ur audience and relate to them with things that are like super familiar to them based on their location.(btw does anyone know how 2 upload a pic here? only that ugly url is showing)