In a dark place. You open your eyes, and you are in a cold, dim, lonely place. Dark purple fog billowing all around. The stone floor has a faint purple glow too. The strange darkness reaches as far as the eye can see. But no, no, suddenly you can make a vague shape in the fog. It’s a person sitting in a huge throne made of rock. Her face is turned away from you, but you can tell that she's a queen, dressed in long flowing purple garments. After a moment, she turns to face you. And that’s when you should start to get really scared. She says: "Come here, come here! Join in! Join the ECTOCOMP 2019!"

Art by Wingless Little People
Banner by Josh Giesbrecht
Text mashup by Ruber Eaglenest

ECTOCOMP is an annual competition for interactive fiction written for the SPOOKY MONTH OF HALLOWEENTOBER. Whether you celebrate Halloween, Day of the Dead, All Saint's Eve, or just love ghost stories and creeping people out, this is your time to shine!

The competition is over! Check for the proper results just a little there, just below.

This competition is for games done in English and Spanish. To make hosting the comp on itch.io work, we've split Ectocomp into two separate jam pages.

You are looking at the English ECTOCOMP jam page (use the link below to change language).

Visita la versión en Español aquí: --> ECTOCOMP 2019 Español

THE RESULTS BY MAIN CATEGORIES

La Petite Mort

Raishall
The Reptile Room
The Witch Beyond the Woods
Limerick Night
The Crimson Terrors of Delamay Manor
Be There!
Mindful
Quite Queer Night Near
Day of the Dead–One Soul’s All Souls Procession
holloween spookie adventure chapter 1

Le Grand Guignol

A Journey to Omega Station
Untitled Nopperabou Game
Additional Tales from Castle Balderstone
When He Died
Crumbs 2: the Will of the People
Pumpkin Pie for Your Soul
Whole Souls
The Village
Once upon a winter night, the ragman came singing under your window
Wild Party
American Maniac

Congrats to everybody! Than you to make of this an amazing event!

THE SUBTHEMES

This year we want to propose five optional subthemes to improve a more diversity of topics and ambiances. But, feel free to ignore those and send whatever you want.

• Spooky adventure! That is, the common and loved usual ECTOCOMP games. Create a game destined to creep the hell out of players, or just go freestyle and just do whatever you want.
• Halloween fest. Base your game on the Halloween festivities, overall the activity of wear costumes and going out with friends doing the "trick or treat".
• Día de Los Muertos. Pay your tribute to the Mexican festivity. As Wikipedia says: "Day of the dead involves family and friends gathering to pray for and remember friends and family members who have died, and helping support their spiritual journey." Also, celebrate Mexican folklore and mythology.
• All Saints', which commemorates the faithful departed. That is, an occasion to talk about how we miss the people we leave behind.
• All Souls' Eve, at the same time, the evening of All souls' is a special moment for some European countries to gather the family around the fire, eat sweet wheat porridge, and tell scary tales.

As per tradition, Ectocomp has two categories:

• La Petite Mort, for those who want to speed-write their game in 4 hrs or less
• Le Grand Guignol, for games that, for whatever reason, took longer than 4 hrs to write (perhaps a more thoughtful masterpiece? perhaps spent too much time writing GORY DETAILS?)

THE RULES

1. Games submitted for La Petite Mort should be written in 4 hours or less.
   1. Any time spent planning, thinking, doodling, researching, etc does not count.
   2. Any time spent writing words or code that end up in-game totally does count. 
      1. (With the exception of if you wrote game engine or library code in the past and now you're using it.)
2. Games submitted for Le Grand Guignol could have an indefinite amount of hours into its development. Either more than 4 hours, or more than 1 week, even more than 1 month.
3. Games should be recognizably "interactive fiction". (Comp admins are not here to police edge cases, but if your game isn't primarily text-based, why are you here?)
4. Games should be, y'know, spooky somehow. (Serious, psychological, campy, satire, etc. all included). But this year we have proposed five main themes, go and take a look at them. They are just up there!
5. The tradition is to work on the games during October, but you can start NOW to work on your game, but the window for submitting the games is set for the last days of October and before 31 Oct, so we can enjoy them in the proper festivities.
6. To participate properly, please choose the correct category for your game. And, please, select one of the main themes, just  for taxonomy reasons.

Go forth and don't be cursed!

VOTES, FEEDBACK, AND COMMUNITY

To vote and participate as a jury, you must do so by giving between 1 to 5 stars at each entry page of the jam. The voting period ends on December 1.

Itchio doesn't allow to leave categories unvoted, so vote and judge the games just as normal. Later we'll make separated ranked lists with each category.

In addition to each entry page, each game has its own itchio homepage. It is somewhat confusing, but it is a way of distinguishing when a game belongs to a jam.

Receiving feedback from players is an essential part of participating in a jam. Take the time leave a kind comment to the authors to thank their participation because having some good times (scary ones). There are several places where the community can meet to discuss and comment on the works presented:

• Each page of each participant has a comment section enabled, here at itchio.
• In turn, on the main page of each game, you can leave comments but only if the author has enabled this section on the page of the game.
• In the intfiction.org forum of the English-speaking international community. This category includes the ECTOCOMP threads.
• In the CAAD forum, of the Spanish-speaking community. This way.
• Finally, you can talk live about the games in the Narrative Games Discord Server: https://discord.gg/dFDKTfE.
• The discord server for the community in Spanish is called Textualiza, invite link: https://discord.gg/tBv8dBC.

Have terrifying adventures!