Interactive Fiction Thread

I could've sworn I had a thread for this already? Anyway

Interactive fiction is cool and good! While traditional prose (generally) necessitates you read everything in the order it's presented on the page, interactive fiction permits nonlinearity and much more control over a story's pace.

Choose-your-own-adventures (and, in a manner of speaking, in-progress forum adventures) are also forms of interactive fiction! Interactive fiction runs the gamut from gamelike arrangements where you need to input the correct sequence to "win" (up to and including game mechanics like stats+inventory management), to essentially-linear stories with branching-but-eventually-rejoining paths.

Many such games are made on Twine! Here are some recommends to get you started!

Twine games
Magical Makeover - Prettify yourself for Princess Philantha's Grand Equinox Ball! (7 endings, but you'll learn how to snag 'em after one playthrough).
Open Sorcery - You're a fire elemental/firewall/baby AI protecting a school, retirement home, and the residences of your two coders/masters. You can lock yourself out of content as you progress but can always backtrack to previous days to revise your actions.
Shitheap Bugtown - the adventures of five people trying to survive in a very dank and unpleasant city.
Candy Ant Princess - Found a proud colony of candy ants as their queen. The story is linear but you get cosmetic changes to the story depending on your inputs? Narratively simple but mechanically kinda cool.
-=HORSE MASTER=- - pour your meagre life savings into the savage world of Horsemanship and raise yourself a champion HORSE!
The Tower - I dunno what to say about this one except that our very own Maxiesatan wrote it. Please play it it's great.
BIRDLAND - Summer camp and dreams about birds. Some mood management game mechanics that can lock you out of certain options, but you can turn those off.
Bell Park, Youth Detective - In the same world/by the same author as BIRDLAND. Help Bell Park solve a murder mystery at the Toronto Library.
Ke$ha - Ke$ha.
Sabbat - nsfw. Turn yourself into the raddest fuckin demon and go destroy government. Short and highly replayable with all the different body part configurations.
Depression Quest - Yeah, that Depression Quest. It's a very frank portrayal of what depression can be like, with the interactive fiction mechanic being used really well as you're "shut out" of choices based on how depression fucks up your ability to help yourself out of it.

Interactive Fictionful games
Fallen London - In which Victorian London got stolen by interdimensional monsters and dumped beside a massive underground ocean. It's a turn-based rpg - think Kingdom of Loathing with turns recharging steadily over time so you can't spend six hours straight on it. Actually I could dump a whole list of turn-based online RPGs like this'n and they'd technically count lmao
A dark room - more like an idle game with RPG elements and a cohesive story?
Candy Box and Candy Box 2 - idle+rpgs in a candy realm. Took me about a week each to clear 'em?


Please recommend others if you've got 'em! Share your thoughts on if you've played the above! Choose (to make) your own adventure, and possibly talk about your process therein if you like!!!

interactive fiction games are really cool and i've been meaning to get to work on one but its harrrrd

Sugarcube is a popular format because it has built in save functionality, and i even think that twine recommends it as the one to go to for 'gamey" twine things! unless they changed things since i dl'd twine, you need to download sugarcube 2 which, afaik, is 100% better than sugarcube 1 and theres no reason to go back for new things

additionally, twine 1.4 has more documentation because its older obviously, but i'd hope that in the last few months there should be more twine 2 documentation???

twine in general might be bit intimidating but javid (who made shit heap bug town) never coded anything before making it so! try it if you've got the drive and stuff!!!

Hornets is one i played a while ago and it left me very unsettled... Its about gods, ink and naturally hornets

Its pretty short, is a horror and also contains gore!

horse master is bugged and i can't complete it :(

i get stuck at day 15

With Those We Love Alive (by Porpentine) is very neat.

Schazer did I mention how much this discovery has rocked my world?

My world is officially rocked.

I've scrolled through some of these, and gosh dang there is some talent, but I've noticed a distinct lack of eagle-time presence on that list!

Choose-your-own-adventures (and, in a manner of speaking, in-progress forum adventures) are also forms of interactive fiction! Interactive fiction runs the gamut from gamelike arrangements where you need to input the correct sequence to "win" (up to and including game mechanics like stats+inventory management), to essentially-linear stories with branching-but-eventually-rejoining paths.

This topic closely relates to a discussion that started in the Adventure Critique thread.

It was asking "Which is better, a mirror or a forum adventure?" but I think that question is a subset of two larger questions:

"What ARE forum adventures?" and "Where do we go from here?"

I hope to not derail this topic too much, and these questions mostly likely deserve their own thread, but we're at a point that what we have is a new genera of storytelling. One that is accessible, interactive, community based, and encourages the growth of both authors and readers.

I do not think that it is an accident that both this forum, and the MSPAFA community that stemmed from it are ones where flagrant, over the top moderation were not yet necessary. The main focus for people here wasn't about shouting opinions at each other, each interaction was predicated around building something unique, and that sort of thing can bring people together.

Perhaps that's the best definition for what we have here? Our subset of interactive fiction: Community-built Interactive Fiction. (We need a catchier name, I think. "forum adventure" has a great feel to it, but it doesn't quite describe the scope of what this genera can do.)


Coming back on to the rails here:

Some very fine examples of interactive fiction I'd recommend:

DEVICE 6

80 Days

Device 6 is an iOS app, and does a brilliant job of branching-path scrolling. Instead of going back to click a link, you scroll back through the text, (much of it decoratively typed out). If you have a few bucks, and an apple iphone/ipad, I highly recommend trying it out.

80 Days is branching path storytelling at it's finest. Even at this point the developers have stated that there are stories that only a handful of people have been able to see. Play this game if you want to see an example of what Twine-like stories can become.


So, as the Twine program is new to me, I do have a question. Is there a Twine-or Twine like format that utilizes scrolling instead of html links?

I've mentioned Adobe Slate before as a possible framing for the type of storytelling we have here. (Update: Since I last checked it out, it seems to have changed to Adobe Spark) Does Twine, or a twine-based software offer anything similar?

I've scrolled through some of these, and gosh dang there is some talent, but I've noticed a distinct lack of eagle-time presence on that list!

The Tower is by Maxie!

sabbat is 2 funny

Interactive fiction is the best. I know there was a site I used to go to that hosted a ton of choose your own adventure novels for free or cheap ($5 at most and those were for the complex multi route novels which were well worth it) but I can't remember the name of them at the moment. I know they moved a few of their bigger adventures to Steam though.

While I haven't played it in about 3 years Improbable Island is a really cool interactive fiction game. It's not as heavy on the story admittedly but there are chat boxes that are relative to the area your character is in so you'll run in to some pretty ridiculous roleplays while waiting for an in game day to pass so you can move again. Likely not the best place if you're looking for constantly serious events / stories / roleplays. A lot of stuff and places in it is user created though which is really cool!*

*Yet again all this info is from when I played it 3 years ago.

Edit: Horse master is the bomb.

I've been reading some of the stories in this thread over the last couple weeks. Sabbat and The Tower were both really good, and I ESPECIALLY liked Birdland and Open Sorcery. If you haven't read any of those ones that Schazer recommended then you should really get on that soon.

Anyway, here's a few more recommendations of my own:

You Will Select A Decision - A series of classic COYA children's books that are definitely not state propaganda, originally written in Soviet era Kyrgyzstan. Except not really, they were actually written by the same guy who wrote Birdland.
Choice of the Dragon - Have you ever wanted to be a dragon and take over kingdoms with an army of goblin minions? Don't answer, that was a rhetorical question.
Creatures Such As We - A gay videogame romance on the moon.

oh my god i am a bad dragon, Choice of the Dragon makes me sad :c

but it's a good story, no doubt. I just made choices i didn't quite like. <:D

classic parser adventures: spider and web, galatea, photopia

choicescript: tin star, choice of the deathless

i should revive my "let's play IF together" thread sometime

Choice of Robots costs 5 bucks to play past the first two chapters but it is amazing and 100% worth it. (And extremely, extremely replayable).

I have played Choice of Robots and I can confirm, it was good.

New find for this thread!

All Hail The Spider God is about You, the Spider Prophet, and Zimforth the Spider.

Due warning: some body horror, plenty of spiders, ~ten minute playtime with 3-5 rounds of repeatability

I downloaded Twine to give it a shot. I went with the most bare-bones, code-y story format because I know my way around a few programming languages. It uses JQuery, which I figured meant it was going to be similar to Java or Javascript. Turns out JQuery, whatever it is, is actually really fucking weird.

Another!

The Shadows That Run Alongside Our Car, where you make connections with strangers at the end of the world.

Chwoka was looking for IF recs so I dredged up a bunch of what I'm going to assume based on aggregated ratings are Reasonable Quality, I've only played King of Bees and Dead Like Ants (and found a couple of The Ceramic Uncertainty's numerous endings) from this batch so I will probably get round to playing them all in the coming week and its assorted public holidays.

King Of Bees is a pulpy spaceromp to dethrone the King of Bees and save mankind.

Dead Like Ants (download, requires downloading a separate IF parser (available from the same website). I played this one a couple years back. Why do so many interactive fiction pieces have insect casts and why are they all so good?

Alabaster(download, requires same parser as Dead Like Ants) is a Snow White retelling with collaborative authorship, which is very much the jam of folks hereabouts.

The Ceramic Uncertainty - Take care of a potted plant that shows up one day in your regular old life and go on, like, a shitton of different adventures

Resurrecting this thread so everyone can scope out Lost Memories Dot Net.

You're a Very Relateable LiveJournal-era Anime-loving Teen Girl navigating love triangles and online+RL relationships through instant messaging. There's also a cool side feature of being able to deck out your very own blog

ceramic uncertainty was good

Tried to replay Open Sorcery and discovered it's now available on Steam/iOS

fortunately I found 16 Ways To Kill A Vampire At McDonalds by the same author as Open Sorcery, so, enjoy

what's next, 13 ways whack a werewolf at Wendy's?

The Temple of No!!!!!

Paperclips is another clicker/idle with an emerging story, like A Dark Room and the Candy Boxes. Big ups to Solifuge/Sunspider for sharing it!

Paperclips is another clicker/idle with an emerging story, like A Dark Room and the Candy Boxes. Big ups to Solifuge/Sunspider for sharing it!

i won