The 2015 Spring Thing* Festival of Interactive Fiction

* or Fall Fooferal, for our Southern Hemisphere Friends

E-mail the organizer

Connect with Spring Thing on Twitter at @SpringThingFest

We think games are for everyone.

Get involved in by playing the festival games or donating a prize!

Code of Conduct Don't Be A Jerk

Making stuff and sharing it online can sometimes suck. hopes to actively work to create a space where all kinds of people making all kinds of games can feel comfortable. Part of this work involves participants, whether authors or players, taking care to treat each other with kindness and respect.

Main Festival Games

S is an annual festival for new works of interactive fiction. Any game submitted will be exhibited, as long as it's mindful of a few guidelines. In short, your game should be new, finished, yours, free, and interactive fiction in a broad sense of the term. You must also submit an intent to enter in advance.

(Some further details on these guidelines can be found below.)

The competition organizer will work with authors whose games might not be appropriate for the festival, and reserves the final right to select which games will be exhibited.

The deadline for submitting an intent to enter for the 2015 festival has now passed. Please contact the organizer if you have any questions! The festival will open for 2016 intents in the fall.

Back Garden Games

Authors can also submit games for the "Back Garden," a selection of games with looser entry requirements. These games will be exhibited alongside the Main Festival games, but:

The Back Garden provides a space for authors who are working on commercial IF, who don't want to compete with other games, or whose release schedules don't line up with the festival's timing.

Donating Prizes

Prizes have always been a fun part of IF events. Starting this year, though we're eliminating cash prizes and numerical rankings, we still welcome donations of interesting, useful, quirky, or funny prizes to go into a general pool. When the festival closes, authors will get to select a prize from the pool in random order until authors or prizes run out. Winning a ribbon does not change selection order or your chance of getting a prize.

The prizes for the 2015 festival were:

Playing the Games

All the festival games are freely available to play online or download from the main site. During the main run of the festival, players could nominate games for an "Audience Choice" ribbon, although we respectfully requested nominators to play at least two festival games before submitting a ballot. Anyone who is not a organizer could make a nomination.

Alumni of past are contacted separately by the organizer with instructions for how to nominate games for the "Alumni's Choice" ribbon.

After the festival closes, nominations close and ribbons are awarded. The games will remain permanently available on the festival site and at the IF Archive, along with any supplemental material of the author's choosing (walkthrough, source code, etc.).

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I submit a revised version of a previously released game?

The general idea behind the "new" guideline is that games should feel like a debut: they should have mostly new content. An extensively fleshed out version of a game prototyped in IntroComp or Ludum Dare would probably be cool; a minor improvement to an already existing game, not so much.

Can I sell a game I released in Spring Thing commercially?

The only right we claim is to freely distribute and archive the festival version of your game. You retain copyright to the game you enter, and are free to sell or otherwise distribute a commercial version. However, by entering you grant the Spring Thing and the Interactive Fiction Archive the non-exclusive right to distribute the festival version of your game for free, forever.

Part of our mission is to preserve a snapshot of the kind of text games people were making at a certain point in time. We want your entry to still be playable decades from now, and this rule helps make that possible.

However, if this is unacceptable, you might consider instead releasing a demo or excerpt from your game in the Back Garden, which has looser entry requirements.

Are there restrictions on what authors can talk about during the festival?

Like we could stop you. But please do review the code of conduct and try to be respectful and polite to your fellow gamemakers.

Is it okay to canvas for nominations for my game? Can I nominate myself?

See the previous answer. Both parts.