* or Fall Fooferal, for our Southern Hemisphere Friends
Spring Thing is an annual online festival celebrating
new interactive fiction from all kinds of people. Welcome!
Held annually since 2002, Spring Thing is a smaller, more informal counterweight to the busier fall Interactive Fiction Competition. Over the years, games have often debuted here that went on to become influential in the IF world or larger indie games scene.
Rather than a competition with rankings, the Thing focuses on bringing together new text games of all kinds: choice-based stories, gamebooks, hypertext fictions, visual novels, text adventures, narrative roguelikes, and wild new experiments.
Spring Thing especially welcomes diverse voices and populations traditionally underrepresented in gaming, including women, people of color, queer and LGBT+ folks, and blind, neuro-diverse, or disabled creators. People from all walks of life should feel encouraged to participate as players, authors, or reviewers.
Entrants to the Main Festival can be nominated for a “Best In Show” ribbon, and all entries are eligible for custom “Audience Award” ribbons. Prize donors also gift fun, unique prizes, which Main Festival entrants have a chance to receive.
Welcome! From the rest of the site you can find out how to donate a prize, play the stories from this year's festival or read more about its history.
For this year's festival, authors who submitted an intent to enter but were unable to get their game completed by the deadline can instead submit to the Late Harvest, a special showcase of games outside the main festival. See this post for more details.
Starting with the 2019 festival, entries can be nominated for an overall Best In Show ribbon, or a custom Audience Award that can be anything the nominator likes: from “Best Story” to “Favorite Twine” to “Cutest Vampires.”
Looking for another event to enter text games in? The Interactive Fiction Competition is the oldest regular event for IF games. Have just the start of a game? Try IntroComp. Spooky games are welcome in ECTOCOMP.
Looking for tools to make text games? There are plenty. For parser-style games, try Inform 7, TADS, Quest, or Dialog. For node-based hyperfiction projects, consider Twine or Squiffy (writer-friendly), or Raconteur, Salet, or Windrift (coder-friendly). Want a choice-based structure like classic gamebooks? Check out ChoiceScript or ink. The visual novel engines Ren'Py or NLBB can help tell stories about characters and conversation. Try weirder experiments with DINE (free-form input) or Texture (draggable words), or plug procedural text tools like Tracery, Sea Duck, or RiTa into a story to make more dynamic output. Even support multiplayer IF with Seltani or Adliberum.
Need a community? Check out IntFiction for forums, or the Interactive Fiction Database and IF Wiki to find games to play and learn about craft. Planet IF aggregates posts about text games, and you can chat with like-minded folks at ifMUD or the Euphoria IF Group. The NarraScope conference is a great place to hang out with interactive fiction writers in person. Many of the tools listed above have their own forums and networks, too: click through to find out more.
Interactive fiction games can be enjoyed by blind players with a little care from authors. Check out audiogames.net for forums and a resources page, or Includification and Blind Computer Games for more tips on making games more accessible generally; the accessibility for blind players IFWiki page also has some good links to more info.
Check out Tristano Ajmone's Awesome Interactive Fiction page for a curated list of more IF authoring tools and resources.
The Spring Thing would like to thank the following people: