The 2022 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction!

• November 26, 2021: Site for 2022 Thing launches; intents to enter open.
• March 1, 2022: Deadline for authors' intents to enter.
• March 31, 2022: Deadline for entries to be submitted.
• April 5, 2022:Festival opens and entries available to play.
• April 12, 2022: Ribbon nominations open.
• May 10, 2022: Ribbon nominations close; ribbon winners announced.

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 the festival's history.

This year there are a few minor tweaks to the rules, mostly to ensure the festival can keep growing in years to come.

• One entry per author: We want to showcase your best work, and leave space for as many authors as possible to participate. (More Details)
• Maximum submission size: Your submission must now take up no more than 100 MB of space. (More Details)
• Streamlined prize selection: Authors opting in to prizes will use a new automated system that will let them rank all submitted prizes and will find the best way to distribute them, replacing the old manual system where authors picked prizes one at a time in a random order (which could drag out for months after the festival ended).
• And we've changed our antipodal variant name from “Fall Fooferal” to “Autumnal Jumble” after some Southern Hemisphere friends brought up the very good point that it's mostly US Americans who say “Fall.”

Looking for tools to make text games? There are plenty. For parser-style games, try Inform 7 (maybe with Vorple), TADS, Quest, or Dialog. For node-based hyperfiction projects, consider Twine or Squiffy (writer-friendly), Raconteur or Windrift (coder-friendly), or articy:draft (professional). Want a choice-based structure like classic gamebooks? Check out ChoiceScript or ink. Fancy the retro stylings of 1980s text games? Consider Adventuron, Gruescript, or PunyInform and Puddle. The visual novel engines Ren'Py or NLBB can help tell stories about characters and conversation. Try weirder experiments with 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, and parser games in ParserComp.

Interactive fiction games can be enjoyed by blind or vision-impaired players with a little care from authors. Check out audiogames.net for forums and a resources page, or Accessible Player Experiences 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:

• Adam Cadre, for starting it;
• Greg Boettcher, for organizing and running it from 2004 to 2013;
• the interactive fiction community, for advice, support, and incredible stories;
• the prize donors, for their generosity.