Part of IFTF’s mission is to support communities of interactive fiction players and makers in their work to preserve, maintain, and inspire continued growth of the medium. In 2024, we put out a call for a pilot program of microgrants (under $1000) to directly support people and projects serving a community of interactive fiction practitioners. In our first year, we helped fund four unique projects touching on accessibility, outreach, access, and community history. We hope to continue the microgrants program in future years as funding allows.
The four projects below, funded in the 2024/25 grant cycle, speak to a range of community needs, passions, and inspirations, and involve work continuing through 2025.
Atrament seeks to further develop the widely used Ink scripting language into a full-featured, user-friendly web engine offering a workflow comparable to Twine or ChoiceScript. Our microgrant helped Serhii mature the engine by funding author documentation, a project wizard command-line tool, desktop OS export features, debugger/compiler improvements, expanded visual markup, and a dedicated website domain. The engine continues active development, with external authors already using it to publish new stories.
Mark Davis and his team set out to create a no-code web platform designed to blend Ink scripts with modern visual elements like image integration and animated Lottie graphics. Designed to lower the barrier of entry for newcomers and hobbyists, the platform launched in fall 2025. Our microgrant supported bringing on a professional graphic designer and covered three years of hosting costs to secure a stable long-term home for the project.
Grace Benfell and Phoenix, co-editors in chief of the games criticism journal The Imaginary Engine Review (TIER), received a microgrant to commission in-depth writing on experimental and marginalized IF games. The funding enabled TIER to publish a major issue containing six ambitious pieces, including game retrospective essays, a study on retro interfaces as literary devices, and a lengthy interview with developer Nathalie Lawhead.
Katy Naylor of The Voidspace received a microgrant to explore the deep overlap between interactive fiction, games, and interactive performance. The project delivered three workshops introducing theatre practitioners and writers to web-based IF tools such as Downpour, Videotome, and Twine, while inspiring ongoing community workshops that blend physical theatre concepts with spatial interactive mechanics.
We would like to thank our Grant Advisors for this cycle, who evaluated the proposals: Colin Post, Grim Baccaris, Kate Compton, Em Lazer-Walker, Juhana Leinonen, Kaitlin Tremblay.
Funding for future microgrant cycles depends on the generosity of IFTF donors. If you’re interested in helping to support future projects like those above, please donate to IFTF directly here or get in touch to chat about a sponsorship or other options!