* 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 play the stories from this year's festival or read more about its history.
We're keeping things cozy and familiar this year. No new stuff or rule changes! See the current requirements for entry.
Starting in the 2019 festival, entries can now 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.” Ribbon nominations will open shortly after the festival launches.
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 general IF forums, or the Twine or Inkle Discords for format-specific communities. The Interactive Fiction Database and IF Wiki are great long-standing community resources, and Planet IF aggregates blog posts about text games. The NarraScope conference is a great place to hang out with interactive fiction writers in person.
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.
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 Accessible Player Experiences 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.
If you find outdated links or know of other resources that should be listed here, please let us know!
The Spring Thing would like to thank the following people: