We are pleased to announce the recipients of the third round of IFTF microgrants, following the continued success of our 2024 and 2025 programs!
A big thank you to everyone who submitted a grant application late last year; we are thrilled to see continuing interest in the program and more interesting projects for the IF community! Our independent committee of Grant Advisors have carefully reviewed all applications, and have selected four projects that represent the expanding technical and cultural horizons of the medium. Without further ado, here are the grant recipients, class of 2026!
Flatgame making tool - Kate Bagenzo This project aims to simplify the creation of “flatgames”, a genre that has a decade of history, most often associated with allowing players to view and explore an author’s own drawings (often hand-drawn and scanned), collages, music, etc. Most of these games are either coded from scratch or using Unity templates, which doesn’t quite succeed in making game making as easy as possible, as originally intended. Kate will receive $650 to develop a streamlined toolset that lowers the barrier for artists and non-programmers to bring their visual stories into the interactive space.
Пригода: A Ukrainian-language text adventure engine - Andrii “Пригода” (Adventure) is a dedicated parser-based engine focused on the specific needs of the Ukrainian-language IF community. Andrii will receive $600 to support his efforts in developing this localized parser-based text adventure framework that provides useful features for authors in Ukrainian, from synonyms and aliases as in other text adventure engines, to more Ukrainian-specific needs such as streamlining recognition of different cases, prepositions, and forms of commands. This seeks to ensure that authors have the linguistic tools and engine support necessary to create text adventures in Ukrainian, which currently don’t exist!
Twine & the IF Community article - Tabitha O’Connell Twine fundamentally reshaped the landscape of interactive fiction over the last decade; however, there was a period around 2014 where the community debated the increased use of the tool and its impact on the IF scene and IFComp. The strong viewpoints and particular context made this a key moment in the IF community, and while participants can recount part of the story and the IntFiction threads are still up, there is little literature taking a closer look at this episode and contextualizing this event. Tabitha will receive $750 to fund her work in collecting appropriate sources and materials, before writing her deep-dive critical and historical article on the topic, an important chapter for the IF community of broad interest for the history of the medium.
New Standalone Engine Built with Godot for Making Splitscreen Co-Op Interactive Fiction - Abhik Hasnain, Adeline K. Piercy Although there have been a few experiments over the decades, IF usually tends to be single-player, and multiplayer experiences are rare and lack specific tooling to explore this further. Abhik and Adeline, two students at Edmonton’s University of Alberta, propose to build a standalone engine using the Godot framework specifically for co-operative storytelling, focusing on giving creators a powerful tool allowing them to explore building splitscreen, multi-player interactive fiction; they will receive $1,000 to fund their work. This could unlock entirely new possibilities of exploration and experimentation around this relatively new genre of co-op (local or remote) narrative play.
We love this year’s class of projects, as they explore 4 very different directions that touch on innovation, new frontiers, fostering creation, and community history. Looking forward to getting updates on them next year! And congratulations to the recipients!
We want to thank all applicants, as well as our Grant Advisors, who volunteered their time to select the projects for IFTF: thank you very much to Grim Baccaris, PB Berge, Rourke Bywater, Liza Daly, Chandler Groover, and Nathanaël Marion!