Interactive fiction

[Terry Greer]

I come from a game development background - and I have in the past worked on multipath dialogue for games. Has anyone on this forum experimented with interactive fiction?

The most likely programs you might have used are:

Twine
Twine / An open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories

Inklewriter
inklewriter

Renpy
The Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine

I have in the past recommended Twine to students I've taught - but (apart from a bit of experimentation) I've never quite got around to writing something from scratch myself - something I intend to do fairly shortly.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone out there has tried this - and what your experiences were.

 

[Feo Takahari]

Does my messing around in RPG Maker count for anything? The learning curve's pretty steep, but you have a lot of options open to you if you get good with if-thens and incrementing variables. I like the idea of letting the player move content around to some degree, exploring side stories and learning character backstory at their own pace.

(I'm going to fix that game someday. Eventually. The damn thing was actually complete when my computer died and my backups turned out to be scrambled!)

 

[CupofJoe]

I tried playing with Renpy and got hopelessly lost... But I was just trying it out so I gave up fairly quickly... I didn't have a strong idea of what I wanted to attain and without a goal it can be a bit aimless and distracting to just go hunting and pecking to see what happenes...

 

[Terry Greer]

Yep any experience with multipath stories is good .
A lot of my experience (outside my 9-5 game design work) has been in creating roleplaying backgrounds for tabletop games - though not for some years now.
A lot of that was really notes for if the players took the story in particular direction - and backstory for improvising over.
(This is probabaly one of the reasons I really love detailed backstories and world building - even if most of it never comes out in a story - just the fact that its there makes the whole thing more concrete).

 

[WooHooMan]

I've experimented with interactive fiction, I guess. Mostly in the form of choose-your-own adventure stories.
I attempted to do one where every reader gets their own storyline because they could submit their own options rather than picking from a list of options. It didn't work. The story concluded but there was only one storyline.

I think interactive fiction is a very interesting concept and I'd like to see it applied outside of video games and tabletop games. Unfortunately, I don't have the skill, time or imagination to pull it off.

 

[CupofJoe]

Not really the same but may be of interest to some...
"Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free, and all future updates will be free! You can download the engine and use it for everything from game development, education, architecture, and visualization to VR, film and animation. When you ship a game or application, you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter. It’s a simple arrangement in which we succeed only when you succeed."
Unreal Engine