SV Linwood is an interactive fiction author, known for their award winning games, A Long Way to the Nearest Star, Dr Ludwig and the Devil, and most recently, winning Best in Show at the SpringThing, Cut the Sky.
Let’s start with a bit of an introduction. Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and how you discovered Interactive Fiction?
Hi! I’m a software developer and amateur writer. Despite my pen name I’m actually from Italy, though I have spent quite a bit of time in English-speaking countries.
Interactive fiction was a part of my childhood, but not a very big one. Like many people, the first IF game I remember playing was Zork. I’m not old enough to have experienced Infocom’s heyday, but we had a copy on the family computer that I sometimes fiddled with—mostly just getting hopelessly lost in the forest, heralding my lifelong struggle with navigation and compass directions.
Throughout the 2000s I played IF sporadically. If I came across a game that seemed interesting I’d check it out, and I ended up playing a lot of the classics of the era, but it wasn’t something I’d actively seek out and I never really engaged with the community. (I did teach myself Inform 7 in the summer of 2009 despite having no plans to actually write a game. My reasons for doing so are a mystery to present-me.)
This all changed around the mid-2010s. Interactive fiction may not have been a big part of my childhood, but point-and-click adventure games were, especially Lucasarts games like Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. So when parser-like choice games came onto the scene, capturing the spirit of point-and-click games in many ways, I sat up and began to pay attention. Around this time someone in an internet community I hang out in started posting mini-reviews of IFComp games, which inspired me to pay closer attention to the competition at first, then to other events like Spring Thing and EctoComp and to the IF community in general.
Things went from there.
So a more quiet interaction with the medium, at first. What pushed you to cross that bridge?
It was IFComp 2019. One of my favorite games that year was Agnieszka Trzaska’s Chuk and the Arena, a really fun puzzly choice game set on a spaceship that felt like a text version of a Lucasarts game. I’d had some ideas for my own take on a “rogue AI on an empty spaceship” type of story, and playing through that game I realized that that was the perfect format for it.
I didn’t really intend to do anything with the concept at first. It was a fun idea to daydream about, but I wasn’t an interactive fiction writer. I didn’t even know where to start. But I kept thinking about it, so one day I downloaded Twine and started fiddling with it.
Thirty minutes later I quit everything and deleted the application. It all just seemed too daunting. What was I thinking? I’d never make this work.
An hour later I downloaded Twine again. This time I kept at it, and I’m glad I did.
This idea would go on to become your first game: A Long Way to the Nearest Star, didn’t it? Can you tell us a bit more about how the idea grew and became the game?
I started with little more than a basic idea, the rogue AI and the PC investigating the aftermath. It was pretty easy to fit the spaceship exploration and unfolding mystery into the structure of the game—turns out there’s a reason it’s such a common premise in IF!—so once I sat down to figure out the outline I didn’t have much trouble working out where I wanted the story to go. Some puzzles and plot points got shuffled around as I worked out the details, and the scope ended up quite a bit bigger than I’d originally envisioned, but for the most part the structure of the game didn’t diverge much from my original concept.
Of course, the real heart of the game isn’t the exploration or the puzzles or the plot. I needed something to distinguish myself from the approximately three thousand games with the same premise, and I knew from the beginning that I wanted to focus on characterization. The conversation system is probably the biggest part of the game, and it was my favorite to work on. The characters quickly developed their own voices, and it was a lot of fun to just let them talk and see where the conversation went.
It’s the aspect of the game that got the most positive feedback, and it’s the one I’m the most proud of.
Was there a particular scene you liked working on the most? And inversely, something you struggled with?
There’s a bit where you can try to get the AI to comment on an empty hallway and it’ll complain about having nothing interesting to say about it and come up with a dumb limerick instead. It’s such a silly, unimportant moment, but it still makes me smile.
As for challenges, there were several puzzles that just refused to cooperate. Turning on the power in the lab is probably the biggest one. I wanted it to be a relatively important moment, but I could never quite think of a satisfying puzzle for it. It ended up being one of the last things I implemented, and I’m still not entirely happy with how the sequence plays out. But it’s serviceable enough and no one has complained about it to my knowledge, so I’ll take that as a win.
Though the biggest challenge of making the game was actually just learning CSS. I’m not a front end developer—actually having to care about how things look was a new experience for me!
You mentioned Chuk and the Arena being an inspiration for the idea. Were there other sources (game, books, movies, etc…) that made ALWttNS what it is today?
Oh, I’ve been a fan of science fiction all my life, and in particular I’ve always been interested in AI characters, so no doubt there’s a hodgepodge of media that left their mark on the game, even if I wasn’t specifically thinking about them when writing.
But of the ones I was thinking about, the biggest influence was Marathon, a series of story-driven FPS games from the 90s. Throughout the games you interact with the various characters through computer terminals, which was what inspired me to present the conversation system in a similar way. And Durandal, the main AI NPC of the series, was the main inspiration for my own. He’s a rogue AI, morally ambiguous but not quite an outright villain. There are certain elements of his backstory that the games never really spell out which I found interesting and wanted to explore.
The story ended up going in a very different direction, of course. But that was the starting point.
And of course the shadow of HAL 9000 looms large over the game, as it does with every story of this sort. I specifically took inspiration from Clarke’s novel, which goes into more detail about his situation and mindset. An AI trapped on a ship with contradicting directions and no way to communicate his distress…
Though you learned Inform back in 2009, why use Twine for this project?
I never even considered Inform when I started the project. I was a fan of parser-style choice games, so from the beginning that was the sort of game I wanted to make, and Twine was the best option for that. It’s not as if I remembered much about Inform after ten years, so it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. And I knew that I wanted conversation to feature prominently, which is something Twine generally does better.
I did at a few points look at the unwieldy mess that was the inventory code and wonder whether it would make more sense to scrap everything and remake it in Inform, but it only took a glance at all the dialogue I’d written to make me discard that notion.
Any lessons you took from working on the interface?
Mostly that I’m bad at interfaces! That was by far the most common criticism of the game. To be honest it wasn’t something I thought too hard about, so I guess the lesson is that maybe I should do that. That’s definitely something I’ll have to figure out the next time I write a choice game with similar mechanics. But that might not be for some time.
ALWttNS, your first game, was released during the 2022 edition of the IFComp. Why go for a competition with your first project?
I was familiar enough with the IF scene to know that publishing a game outside of a competition as a complete unknown would get very little attention, and at that point I’d worked on the game too long to want to release it into the void. And competitions are a good way to get feedback. I knew by then that I wanted to write more, so that would be very valuable.
Admittedly, IFComp was an ambitious choice for my first game ever. It’s the biggest competition of the year, and the most competitive. I certainly had my doubts going in!
Partly, my decision was because IFComp was significant to me, as my introduction to the IF community and as the event that inspired me to write a game to begin with. Mostly, though, the schedule just happened to line up. I’m generally more productive during the summer due to having more free time, and that August I sat down and really worked on finishing the game. The IFComp deadline came at just the right time.
Did you have a particular goal or expectations going into the competition?
Not really. My attitude going in was “I’ll throw my hat in the ring and see what happens”. Mostly I was interested in hearing what people thought of my game. I expected to get a few encouraging but not glowing reviews and place somewhere around the middle. Maybe make the top 20 and get mentioned on the announcement stream if I was really lucky.
Which I guess is what happened!
Indeed! ALWttNS not only got to the Top 20, but reached the 3rd spot, granting you the Rising Star accolade (highest rank by a new author). It also won a couple IFDB Awards, XYZZY nominations, and appeared in the TOP 50 IF games of all time. What did you feel about the community’s response?
Overwhelmed! And incredibly grateful! It’s all been a lot to take in.
Was there a review or comment about the game that stuck with you?
There isn’t one specific review I can point to, but there were several reviewers who really liked and connected with the main NPC of the game. It’s of course always nice when people enjoy the puzzles and the gameplay, but it’s seeing people engage so much with a character I created that really makes me feel like I’ve made it.
You returned the following year, submitting to IFComp 2023 a parser game in Inform, called Dr Ludwig and the Devil. Can you tell us a bit more about the game?
Dr Ludwig started as a side project in spring 2022. At that point I’d been working on ALWttNS for a couple years and my brain had been pretty thoroughly rewired to see inspiration for interactive fiction everywhere, so I had a lot of random ideas floating about in my head. One was about a mad scientist dealing with an ineffective torch and pitchfork-wielding mob. Another was an idea for a puzzle about banishing a summoned demon.
I didn’t intend to do anything with them at first. I really needed to finish ALWttNS. But then I had a sudden burst of inspiration—what if I were to combine the two ideas? As soon as I did, the concept of the game immediately came together: a comedy about classic horror tropes and absurd legal procedures.
Once I had the idea in my head, I couldn’t just leave it.
What was your process creating DrL&D?
It was extremely disorganized. Once I had the basic mechanics down (the conversation system, the Grimoire, and giving orders to the Devil) I just worked on whatever I felt like. Characters and puzzles got added as I thought of them. Most days I’d just fiddle around with the game a bit, change a few responses, add some conversation topics, and so on. To be honest, it’s a miracle the whole thing ended up as cohesive as it did.
On one hand, the writing process being so chaotic meant that the game took maybe three times longer to develop than it should have. On the other hand, it also meant that the game wound up full of custom responses, obscure actions, and strange edge cases that I implemented just because I was procrastinating on writing a plot-important description. This is something that a lot of players enjoyed, so I guess it worked out.
Were there particular things that inspired you while working on Dr Ludwig?
The main inspirations are fairly obvious: classic horror films (Hammer, Universal, and the like) and Faust, though more the pop culture depictions than the original sources themselves. In writing the setting I took inspiration from the approach taken by many classic point-and-click adventures—a somewhat self aware theme-park version of a common pop culture setting filled with anachronisms and genre tropes. It’s the sort of thing that can feel corny, but it felt right for the project.
One of the main puzzles of the game, collecting the ingredients for the demonic ink, is of course straight out of Monkey Island. The whole gameplay loop of collecting objects by interpreting a list of instructions in creative ways was a great fit for a game about weaseling out of the terms of a contract. I left out the follow up where you have to collect all the ingredients again while getting even more creative, though.
Was there a scene/character/action that you enjoyed most? Or something that you had trouble putting together?
The answer to both questions is the same: the Devil, and specifically giving him orders. Persuasion mechanics occasionally pop up in parser games, and I always struggle with them. With a few exceptions (e.g. the mouse in Curses, which is limited to cardinal directions), I always find them difficult to work with, often with not enough clueing or implementation. Obviously I wanted to avoid this. I wanted the mechanic to be fun to play and experiment with.
Getting it all to work was such a challenge. I needed to have it give useful failure messages, which Inform doesn’t do by default (shout out to Nathanael Nerode, whose extensions were very handy for figuring out how to do this). I needed to account for pretty much every action in the parser and several others that an inventive player might try. The Devil being confined to the summoning circle meant that many actions could be blocked, but I still needed to catch every possible attempt and make sure the game gave sensible responses, whether failed attempts or refusals. And there were tons of cases that needed special handling. For example, I had to implement special code to give messages like “The Devil looks at his robe” instead of “The Devil looks at the Devil’s robe”. And did you know that when making the Devil SAY a phrase the game will attempt to format it so that the capitalization and punctuation makes sense? It’s the sort of thing that no one pays any attention to but will feel off if it’s not done. It was all so much work!
But, man, was it satisfying when it all came together. And it was even more satisfying to see players try strange actions and have the game accept them.
Compared with your previous IFComp participation, did you have a particular goal this time around?
Nothing concrete. I didn’t think I’d place as high as the previous year, so I didn’t go in with too many expectations. I figured I could strike “do well in IFComp” off the bucket list and not worry too much about how I’d place. I was just hoping people would enjoy my game. Comedy is scary to write—trying and failing to be funny is a pretty embarrassing experience. As long as I could make someone laugh, I’d count it as a success.
I really underestimated the power of writing a comedic parser puzzle game, I guess!
DrL&D was quite the success that year, reaching 1st place and getting Miss Congeniality at the IFComp, as well as Outstanding Game of the Year and Outstanding Humour at the IFDB Awards. How did you feel about that?
To be fair, it only tied for Game of the Year! (With Drew Cook’s Repeat the Ending, which is an honor in itself.) But yes, the game ended up getting way more attention than I expected. It’s been… a lot.
IFComp 2023 was an interesting time for me. A little less than a month before the beginning of the competition I was diagnosed with cancer, which is the sort of thing that tends to overshadow pretty much everything else in your life. So IFComp was pretty far down my list of priorities, but it was also more or less the one good thing going on in my life. It made for an interesting mix of emotions.
I watched the announcement stream having just come home from the hospital after an operation. Part of me was hoping I wouldn’t even make the Top 20, because Jacqueline had asked us to prepare something to say in the chat and I—hopefully understandably—hadn’t done that. The moment second place got announced and I realized I’d won the world seemed to stop.
I didn’t know what the future would look like, but in the meantime, man, what an achievement.
I’m sure that Dr Ludwig will go the way of some other IFComp winners before it—get its moment in the sun then quietly fade from the minds of the community. But it helped me during a difficult time, and that means a lot to me. I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who played and liked this silly game I made.
(Everything turned out fine. It wasn’t a very scary type of cancer.)
That is an incredible achievement, indeed! Dr Ludwig was a really well-rounded game that deserved its flowers (and more!).
Personally speaking, Dr Ludwig has been standing in my favourite IF games list since I played it – and I wouldn’t be surprised if it continued to appear in the next IF TOP 50 of All Time. Speaking of favourite games, is there a title that landed in your personal favourites as soon as you played it?
Oh, a lot! But the first that comes to mind is Superluminal Vagrant Twin, which is a game that I imagine was created in a lab to appeal to me specifically. The limited parser, the space exploration, the weird worldbuilding are all very much my jam.
You recently returned with another comp-winning entry, Cut the Sky, submitted to the 2025 SpringThing. Can you tell us a bit more about the game?
Cut the Sky is a parser game about solving all your problems with a sword, inspired by classic science fiction/fantasy literature and specifically the Dying Earth subgenre (plus a smattering of anime swordplay). I’d taken a break from writing for about a year, but IFComp 2024 inspired me to start again. I wanted a smaller project to work on, and a limited parser game fit the bill. After the chaos that was writing Dr Ludwig, it was very cathartic to be able to tell the player, “These verbs are all you’re getting, deal with it.”
Why the verb CUT in particular?
It felt right. It’s an inherently destructive verb. Action games are always fun, but at the end of the day what does it mean to be someone whose main mode of interacting with the world is through violence? The tension between the verb and the connection with the world and with other characters is at the heart of the game.
That and cutting absurd things is always fun.
What inspired you to create Cut the Sky?
The initial spark of inspiration came from watching Castle of Cagliostro—one of the characters is a samurai with an unbreakable sword—but the end result doesn’t have much in common with it. Mostly the game is inspired by the Dying Earth subgenre in general and Jack Vance’s work in particular. I’ve wanted to play with that sort of setting for a long time. There’s something compelling about the melancholy of a world living in the shadow of its past.
(And of course shout out to C.E.J. Pacian’s Gun Mute, which wasn’t a conscious inspiration but certainly was a subconscious one.)
Unlike your previous creations, Cut the Sky utilises a chapter format, with different characters. What led you to move away from a singular storyline?
Once I had the basic concept and was brainstorming what the game would actually look like, I was coming up with a lot of disconnected scenarios that weren’t really complex enough to stand on their own. Rather than pick one and flesh it out or try to mash them together, neither of which I think would have worked very well, I decided to separate the game into various episodes and came up with an overarching plot. It’s not a very common structure in parser games, but the setting I wanted to write required more breadth than the typical parser game’s constrained map would allow. (Also I don’t like compass directions and will jump at any chance not to use them.)
The game being composed of multiple chapters, is there one that you are the most fond of? one that you feel most proud of? and one that was particularly challenging?
The scene in the city is probably the one I’m most proud of. It’s the most complex chapter in the game (which to be fair isn’t saying much), with several characters, lots of objects, and multiple puzzle solutions. It was very satisfying to put together, and I’m quite fond of the end result. I’m also fond of the wizard chapter, which was a lot of fun to write, and of the riddle, which got some funny reactions in the transcripts.
The most difficult scene to write was definitely the tower. It’s the build up to the climax, and I wanted it to be challenging enough to feel like a culmination but with enough momentum to keep the player moving forward without getting stuck, which is a tough balance to strike. I’m not super happy with how it turned out, but I guess it works well enough.
It did indeed work well enough, as you went on to get Best in Show at the Spring Thing! Did you expect such positive reactions to your entry?
To be honest, by the time the deadline came around I was so sick of looking at the game that I wasn’t really thinking about the reaction at all. I just wanted to kick it out the door and be done with it. Then a couple days into Spring Thing I looked at the IFDB page, saw that it already had seven ratings, most of which were five stars, and I realized it was going to be fine.
What prompted you to submit to the Spring Thing rather than the IFComp, like your other games?
Timing, mainly. I started writing the game at the end of 2024 and finished at just the right time. But I also wanted a change of pace after IFComp, and Spring Thing seemed fun.
How did you experience Spring Thing as an author? Was it different from the IFComp?
It didn’t feel all that different to me. Sure, the details changed—Spring Thing is generally more chill, with the ribbons instead of ranked placements—but at the end of the day the experience boiled down to releasing a game, fretting about it until the reviews started coming in, and playing everyone else’s games in the meantime.
Are there other events you’d be interested in participating in?
I’d like to do EctoComp someday—I haven’t written a lot of horror and I’d like to fix that. And every year I have fun going through the smaller competitions and jams. I haven’t participated yet, but maybe inspiration will strike one day. I love the amount of events being organized in the community these days. I know you’re one of the people behind that, so thank you!
You’ve worked with two very different engines to create games, Twine and Inform. How has the transition from one to the other been going? Any advice for authors thinking of going from one format to the other?
Pretty smoothly, all things considered. They’re very different languages, and of course writing a parser game takes a different mindset than than writing a choice game, even a more parser-like one, but once you have a bit of programming experience picking up a new language isn’t too complicated, and I’ve played enough parser games that I had a good idea of what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. Inform’s natural language syntax is unlike anything I’ve ever worked with, but it was interesting to try something new.
And it’s nice not to have to care about CSS, too!
My advice is that if you’ve ever been tempted to try out a new engine and you have the time then just go for it. Learning a new language is a good exercise, and it’s always good to see more writers cross the parser/choice divide. We’ve seen several authors do that in the past years, and it’s been to the benefit of both formats.
Are there other engines you’d be interested in trying out?
I do sometimes wistfully look at TADS. There are a lot of really cool things you can do in it. (And as much as I enjoy Inform, the first time I opened up the TADS documentation and saw curly braces and equal signs my reaction was, “Finally, something normal!”) I also have a couple vague ideas that could probably work in ChoiceScript or Ink. We’ll see!
If you could give general advice to a starting IF creator, what would it be?
Man, I feel kind of unqualified to give advice. I’m still figuring things out myself! I really just got here by luck—I had experience in relevant fields, and the games I wanted to write happened to be the sort that do well in competitions. And “spend years beforehand writing and coding” or “just write a comedic parser puzzle game” isn’t very good advice!
I think my advice would be simply to play a lot of IF, which like “writers should read a lot” is the sort of thing that’s incredibly obvious but does sometimes need to be said. And not just the sort of IF you want to make—parser, choice, puzzly games, Choice of Games-style narratives… There are a lot of lessons to be found in many different genres, and now that we’ve mostly stopped tearing each other apart over parser vs choice there’s no reason to keep them separated in their little enclosures.
Any plans for future projects?
Nothing concrete for now. I’ve got several vaguely formed ideas rattling about my head (including some for a sequel tentatively called Dr Ludwig and the Vampire). I’m not a very diligent writer, so who knows when any of them will materialize. Hopefully sooner rather than later!