Maryam Gousheh

Varkana

My first (and only) Interactive Fiction that I made with Inform 7 programming language.

Varkana is a region in a world with a timeless, mildy fantasy/sci-fi setting, with the city-state of Arg Varkana as its major outpost of civilization. There are lots of Persian and Mesopotamian-inspired elements present, drawn from my years of archaeology hobbyism.

We start the game as Farahnaaz, a library employee in Arg Varkana, enjoying her summer holidays while the town is lively with seasonal celebrations. Her hometown is to be visited by a team of ambassadors from Ashtarta – a distant, mysterious land with advanced technology and a recently-reestablished regime.

All starts peacefully till a simple neglection turns the protagonist’s peaceful day into a chaotic one – to a stranger’s fortune.

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Being my first IF ever (I made it with no knowledge of the modern IF culture and community, while learning simultaneously how to use Inform 7 language) I hadn’t originally intended to go very public. But I ended up applying for IF Comp 2007 (link: http://www.ifcomp.org/comp07/index.html), the 13th annual IF competition. Varkana got the 6th place out of 27.

It also won the Best Setting award in XYZZY awards 2007 (link: http://ifwiki.org/index.php/XYZZY_Awards_2007)

I had planned to make a long story involving extensive adventures and travelling around an immersive world. But some months later I realized that the project was getting too big to handle in one go, and unfortunately I got some sort of bug inherent to the parser which was not possible for me to fix. So I decided to halt the story at a certain point and leave the rest for a sequel.

For more info and reviews you can consult Varkana IFWiki page:
http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Varkana

It was played in an ifMUD (interactive fiction multi-user dungeon) event on February 2010. The transcription can be found here:
http://www.allthingsjacq.com/intfic_clubfloyd_20100201.html

Download: Varkana.zip
You’ll need an interpreter to run it. I recommend Gargoyle.

Since it’s way past now, I doubt I’ll release the sequel. Please keep that in mind if you want to play it. Also it’s better suited to the players who enjoy reading long descriptions, dialogues and immersion in a fantasy environment.

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(Recent as in 2014, 2015 and of course 2016)

Considering the little time that I had, I mostly opted for simple pencil drawings.

Please note the image captions, as some of these images are based on existing drawings by other artists. I did it for training, to get a better idea of how they were done. If you’re one of those artists (or someone who holds the rights to their works) and you object, please let me know and I’ll remove it.