"...the witches, who came from the kingdom's most remote corners to gather on certain nights of the year within the castle ruins; a place they regarded as their own, perhaps because it had been founded by a necromancer, and deemed the most fitting setting for their nocturnal revels and diabolical incantations. Since many other exorcists had previously attempted to drive the infernal spirits from the site, only to find their prayers and sprinklings of holy water of no avail..."

—Letters from my cell, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

Cover image: Escena de Brujería, by Valeriano Domínguez Bécquer

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

This competition is open to games written in English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, or any other language. 

You can read the rules in other languages here:

Leer las reglas en Español

Visiter les règles en Français

Lesen Sie die Regeln auf Deutsch

Leggi il regolamento in italiano

As per tradition, ECTOCOMP has two categories:

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

SUBTHEMES AND INSPIRATION

Additionally, here are some optional subthemes or inspiration prompts to improve the diversity of topics and ambiance. But feel free to ignore those and submit whatever you want.

• Spooky adventure! That is, the common and well-loved typical ECTOCOMP games. Create a game destined to creep the hell out of players.
• Sweet supernatural. Yeah, your game can be supernatural, but maybe there is no need to be creepy. Maybe your ghosts and monsters are homies and sweet.
• Halloween fest. Base your game on the Halloween festivities—the activity of wearing costumes and going out with friends to trick-or-treat.
• Día de los Muertos. Pay your tribute to the Mexican festivity; celebrate Mexican folklore and mythology. As Wikipedia says: "Day of the Dead involves family and friends gathering to pray for and remember friends and family members who have died." 
• All Saints'. A commemoration of the departed; an occasion to talk about how we miss the people who have left us.
• All Souls' Eve. A special moment in some European countries to gather the family around the fire, eat sweet wheat porridge, and tell scary tales.
• Or any other festivities around the world, folk horror or not.

THE RULES

(The organizers reserve the right to remove games from the competition that violate any of these rules.)

1. Games submitted for the La Petite Mort category 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 ends up in the game DOES count. (Except if you're reusing a game engine/library or code that you wrote in the past.)
   3. Time spent coding the game's styling (e.g., CSS) DOES NOT count.
2. Games submitted for Le Grand Guignol can have an indefinite number of hours in their development—more than 4 hours, more than 1 week, or even more than 1 month.
3. ECTOCOMP games cannot be updated during the competition. Exception: if you find you have a game-breaking bug, you are allowed to fix the bug to guarantee players can complete your game. But otherwise, NO UPDATES! NO POLISHING!
4. Games should be recognizably "interactive fiction". (Comp admins are not here to police edge cases, but if your game isn't primarily text-based, it's probably not a good fit. But note that games made with Bitsy are welcome.)
5. Games should be, y'know, spooky somehow. (Serious, psychological, campy, satire, etc. all included.) Take a look at the subthemes listed above for inspiration.
6. Use of generative AI for game text, art, translation, or coding is strictly forbidden. This competition is designed to be a meeting place for the community; machines have nothing to do with it!
7. The tradition is to work on your game(s) during October, but you can start at any time. The submission deadline is October 31.
8. Your game(s) should be original and previously unpublished, except for previously released games that are being translated to a new language for ECTOCOMP.
9. Presenting demos or incomplete games: submitting a demo is okay as long as it is "self-contained".  That is, remove all objects that do not make sense in the context of the demo. Like the first episode of a TV show, it should still feel like a single piece of art. Also, ECTOCOMP is a competition, not a jam, so this may not be the best environment for a game that feels unfinished. Finally, remember that presenting your incomplete work publicly in this or any other event could disqualify your work from future events when it's ready and finished.
10. To participate properly, please choose the correct category for your game.
11. ECTOCOMP is generally a light-hearted competition meant for participants to have fun. If the objective of your game is to be directly offensive to any type of group or person, then you don't understand ECTOCOMP, and you shouldn't be here anyway.

If you have any questions about the rules or the event in general, check the FAQs at the bottom of the page. If your question isn't answered there, you can use the community tab to post a question, or email me at rubereaglenest at proton dot me.

May the harvest be plentiful!

VOTES, FEEDBACK, AND COMMUNITY

To vote and participate as a judge, you should rate each entry you play on a scale of 1 to 5 stars on the entry's jam page. The voting period ends on November 30.

The official ECTOCOMP results will be determined using the raw score each game receives, rather than itch.io's adjusted scores. Results will initially be hidden while the organizers calculate the rankings for each category (La Petite Mort (English), Le Grand Guignol (English), and sub-categories for LPM and LGG for each other participating language).

Receiving feedback from players is an essential part of participating in an interactive fiction competition. Take the time to leave a kind comment for the authors to thank them for their work. There are several places where the community can meet to discuss and comment on the works presented:

• Each entry's jam page has a comment section enabled here at itch.io.
• On the main page of each game, you can also leave comments if the author has enabled a comment section there.
• The intfiction.org forum, a hub for IF discussion for the English-speaking community. This category includes the ECTOCOMP threads.
• The Neo-Interactives Discord Server, an international community focused on interactive fiction: https://discord.gg/VAjGbEby68.
• The Discord server for the community in Spanish, Textualiza:  https://discord.gg/6cG4YAJ.
• The CAAD forum of the Spanish-speaking community. This way.
• The German-speaking community meets at https://if-forum.org/.
• The Discord server for the community in Italian: https://discord.gg/GrFhtjVAGp.

ARCHIVING OF THE ENTRIES

To foster the development of a strong and perennial community of interactive fiction players and writers, the organizers of ECTOCOMP will upload all submitted games to the IF Archive. This will ensure that the games will be available for future players and authors and that they will be preserved for posterity. If you do not want your game to be uploaded to the IF Archive, please let us know by checking the opt-out box in the submission form.

FAQs

Q: Can I submit my project to other jams at the same time it's submitted to ECTOCOMP?

A: Yes! As long as your project isn't published before October 1, you can submit it to as many other jams as you like.

Q: Is there a limit on how many entries I can submit?

A: No, you can submit as many as you like!

Q: Does the "no generative AI" rule include machine translation?

A: As long as you aren't wholesale generating new content with an LLM, translation tools are allowed.

Q: Is NSFW content allowed?

A: Yes!

Q: If several people work on the same game and each of them spend 4 hours or less on it, can that game be submitted to the La Petite Mort category?

A: No, if the total time spent on a game (by one person or multiple) exceeds 4 hours, it is not eligible for La Petite Mort.

Q: Can I submit a translation of a game that was originally created in for 4 hours or less to the La Petite Mort category?

A: ECTOCOMP’s policy is that games written in 4 hours or less and then translated to a different language is that they’re no longer eligible for LPM, given that the total time for game creation plus translation is now over 4 hours.

Beware of witches!