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Start of Chapter 26: Publishing |
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Back to §26.5. IFDB: The Interactive Fiction Database |
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Onward to §26.7. Meetups and Conferences |
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§26.6. Competitions, Exhibitions, and Jams
One very common way to get players for IF is to enter the story into an IF competition. The annual IF Competition, often just called IFComp, is the most prestigious and has the widest field, but the Spring Thing, ParserComp, EctoComp, and other events also catch people's attention. Entering a competition is a path of least effort for authors promoting their new work, because the competition organizer usually takes care of hosting and archiving submitted stories, promoting the competition as a whole, collecting votes, and encouraging players to post reviews. Different contests have different arrangements. The ifwiki usually posts a list of current and upcoming competitions, as well as lists of results for those recently past, on the front page:
Some competitions also have their own websites, at least at the relevant times of year.
All the same, there are many IF works that aren't cut out for competition release. Competitions tend to be best for short or medium-short works, because judges don't necessarily have time to play a lot of long stories at once, and sometimes this is a condition of entry.
It's also good for publicity to win one of the annual XYZZY Awards. All interactive fiction stories released in a given year are eligible, as long as they are listed on IFDB.
Meanwhile, itch.io hosts many jams every year. A small handful of these are specifically intended for interactive fiction or parser-based adventures, but there are many other jams that allow entrants to put up any game with an appropriate theme, regardless of its format.
lists the calendar of everything currently upcoming.
Finally, if your project is heavily focused on procedural generation – creating or remixing elements on each playthrough – then it may have a natural home at procjam:
Procjam is a yearly event to "make something that makes something", and welcomes all kinds of generative projects, whether they are games or not.