Interactive Fiction Game Engines

Interactive FictionReading online with friends?

Adam Clare

www.RealityisaGame.com

adam@WeroCreative.com

Why?

• Back to our roots. It’s like the digital campfire, but

with cheesier analogies.

• Write scripts and dialogue for your game

• Prototype, of course

• Become a better writer and game designer

• Challenge yourself!

History

• Books.

• Two main types of interactive fiction:

• Parser

• Click adventure

• MUDs

Famous IF

• Zork (1980)

• The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (1984)

• 80 Days (2014)

Puzzle Vs. Story

Engines

• StoryNexus

• Inform 7

• Versu

• Twine

Links

• For links to engines and more see:

• http://www.realityisagame.com/archives/2963/gettin

g-started-with-some-interactive-fiction

StoryNexus

StoryNexus

• Proprietary software made for the web

• Followed the development of earlier game engines

• Online library of games made on their software

• Like other proprietary systems, no common

language :(

‘Storylets’ - also called ‘cards’ - describe events that might happen:

• an argument with an old flame

• a fight on a hilltop at sunset

• a long bath

• midwifing wolves or kittens.

A storylet consists of a starting event, one or more choices (usually), and the results of those choices.

‘Qualities’ describe effects that have happened:

• the fact that you had that argument

• how serious were the wounds you suffered in the fight

• how much soap you have left after the bath

• how many wolves (or kittens) you brought safely into the world.

A character has a quality at a specified level - 1, 5 or 200, for example. (It doesn’t always display as a number, but

more on that later.)

To put it another way, storylets model choices, and qualities model consequences.

Inform 7

Inform 7

• Can create ‘relations’ between objects in the game

world

• “The room next to us is the Ball Pit”

• Character creation for interesting responses

• Cascading IF statements

• Library of extensions to expand functionality

• Collaboration tools with collaboration built into their

approach

• Export to PDF, web, z-machine, and Quixe

• Host anywhere

• Runs on any system

Versu

Versu

• Proprietary software based on Inform 7

• Thus similar in concepts

• Starts with genre and works outwards from there

• “Story files” (roles, premise, and context)

• “Character files” (descriptions)

Concerns About These

Tools

Concerns:

• Copyright issues

• No fan fiction

• Abide by the ToS

• We’ve all read them, right?

Concerns:

• Who owns what you create?

• What if you want to sell your story?

• What happens if the website dies?

• Etc.

Concerns:

• Ontology!

• You’re using somebody else’s approach

• These all take effort to learn like any other system.

• We’re still repeating the same mistakes as before.

Twine!

Why I Love it

• Visual

• Easy

• Accesible

• Open source

• Active, helpful, community

I’ll just show you

• Let’s play Twine!

Issues With Interactive

Fiction

Issues:

• Length!

• Easy to create means that there’s a lot of 50 Shades

of writing

• Screen reading compatibility

• ROI (if you care about that)

Issues:

• Out of control IF statements

• Debugging can be difficult

Adam Clare

www.RealityisaGame.com

adam@WeroCreative.com