Announcing Storyfall - a new IF authoring tool and publishing platform!

[Storyfall]

Hey folks,

I’m happy to announce that after a lot of late nights and long weekends, I’m launching Storyfall - a brand new interactive fiction publishing platform!

Storyfall - The Interactive Fiction Platform

I made Storyfall into more than an editor - I built out the full suite of tools that a writer would want. You can do everything from writing and publishing, to selling your stories. Storyfall isn’t a traditional publisher, we don’t buy the rights to your stories. Instead, Storyfall is a marketplace. Writers can write stories and sell them directly to readers, and you retain all rights.

As a writer, I wanted to build out a platform with these key features:

• A GUI for writing your stories with no coding or scripting required!

• A “story tree” that lets you visualize your story as you write it, and jump around between scenes.

• Your readers can subscribe for free, or you could have paid tiers. Subscriptions can have all kinds of benefits (access to stories, early access perks, access to private forums).

• Create your own forums, either centered around yourself as a writer or around a specific story, and optionally gate access (e.g. you can require that a reader has to have purchased the story, or be a free or paid subscriber to participate).

• A blog and newsletter feature so you can email your subscribers.

• Automatic emails notifications sent out to subscribers whenever you publish your stories.

• Metrics for writers to track views, plays, and engagement.

• Teams for collaborating on story writing.

• AI help when you want it, e.g. to generate cover images for your stories.

Readers also get some cool features:

• A genre-themed player. The story player has a different look depending on the genre (which you can disable if you want)

• A typewriter effect (optional) that can add suspense as it slowly reveals story text.

• You can play free stories as much as you want, with unlimited saved games and a journal feature that lets you read through all your past choices and scenes.

• Since Storyfall is brand new and doesn’t have any stories yet (besides my demo story “The White Room”), readers can create AI-created stories for themselves. Readers can write a description of whatever story you want created, and start playing an AI-customized game. The stories aren’t as good as human-written IF, but it’ll help readers have something to do until there are some actual stories published on Storyfall.

It’s completely free to use!

Writers are only charged a fee when they make a sale, at which point there’s a 30% platform fee and some Stripe payment processing fees, plus we’ll handle sales tax remittance for you.

Storyfall is free to use anywhere, but can only be monetized in the U.S. right now. I really wanted to have international payments, but compliance with international sales tax laws is virtually impossible for a small business. I’m hopeful to expand internationally someday! I’m finalizing the payment system now, and that should be live soon.

I’d love some feedback. Professionally, I’m a software engineer, but writing is one of my hobbies - so this has definitely been a huge passion project for me. I’m still building out Storyfall actively so there might be some bugs or rough edges!

As an aside, I am writing a longer story right now, that I hope to publish one chapter at a time, with the first chapter hopefully coming out in the next few weeks.

[Hidnook]

Hello, and welcome to the forum! There are lots of new developers coming here and introducing their new platforms, but it’s often unclear what they offer.

This seems like a choice-based game. With that in mind, here are some things to think about that a lot of people will be asking:

• Can readers play without making an account?
• What does it do that Twine, Ink, Choice of Games, etc. struggles with?
• What does it struggle with that those platforms do well with (platforms being specialized is completely fine)?
• How is it for monetization compared to Itch?
• Can you download/play games outside of the platform (e.g. as HTML)?
• Are there local saves? Offline editing?
• It can be no-code, but are there ways to get complicated mechanics made (e.g. variables, functions)?
• Does the story tree let you make relatively linear storylines easily?
• What debugging features are there?
• What is the purpose of grouping creation/publishing/monetization/blog/forum/email all together?
• Why do you need AI inclusion (and for that matter, why do so many devs include it), considering the whole point is user-created stories?
• What collaboration features are there?
• Can the speed of the typewriter effect be changed?

[Storyfall]

Thanks for the welcome, and these are all great questions! I wasn’t sure how much to write so I tried to be more on the brief side and didn’t mention all the editor and other features in my OP.

• Readers need accounts to play. There’s some limited functionality I built into the landing page to preview the demo story without logging in, but it’s not a complete experience.
• I first tried to write some IF a few years ago using ChoiceScript and found the whole experience to be kind of clunky and distracting - even as a coder. I wanted to build an editor that required no scripting or coding at all, it’s as close to WYSIWYG as I could make it. You still get all the power of ChoiceScript (AFAIK, correct me if I’m wrong!) but without having to write code. I also have an “immersive editing” mode where all the extra stuff around the editor disappears and you can just focus on your writing. Twine’s editor shares some similarities to the Story Tree I mentioned (which is the visual half of Storyfall’s editor) but lacks any distribution or monetization systems - Storyfall gives you everything in one place, we’ll host the story for free, distribute it, and help you monetize it.
• I think the biggest hurdle for Storyfall to overcome is just the initial lack of readers. We’re brand new so we obviously don’t have the readership and reach that a publisher like Choice of Games does. Hopefully that changes as readers and writers start using it more.
• Itch seems to have a much more flexible monetization system. They let you pick between (what in Stripe lingo would be) “Direct Charges” and “Destination Charges”, i.e. you can either get paid directly by readers or via the platform. Storyfall was originally going to be a direct charge system with smaller fees, but as I did more research I found out that “marketplace facilitator” laws basically make the marketplace legally liable for all the sales taxes anyway, even if you as a platform never touch that tax money. I’m not actually sure how Itch gets around this. I had to switch to using destination charges on Stripe so now Storyfall is responsible for all chargebacks, sales tax remittance and filing, etc. but the fees went up. Also unlike Itch, Storyfall has fixed fees. You still keep something like 60% of each sale which I think is much better than what you’d get with a regular publisher, plus you retain all rights to your work.
• You can fully export a story in a JSON file, which includes the HTML for all of your scenes. But as it stands there’s no renderer outside of Storyfall that can parse this and make it into a playable game. If there’s significant demand for this I could make one! Though I also suppose that anybody in the community could too.
• There’s currently no offline editing but I’d love to add this feature, I’m a big fan of offline modes in apps.
• There are variables yes - there’s a handful of ways to get complexity:
  • You can define custom variables, NPCs, or factions. Variables can be numbers, booleans, or free text.
  • You can mutate the variables (or NPC and faction sentiment) when a reader makes a choice.
  • You can have two kinds of choices: “interact” and “continue”. Interaction choices make some change to the variable system but stay on the same page (e.g. “you ate a burger” causes you to have +10 food), while continue choices move you onto the next scene.
  • You can make choices conditional based on having met some criteria, e.g. hasKey must be true to open a door, or your NPC relationship with Iris needs to be at least 50 to romance her.
  • You can render conditional text both in scenes and choices, e.g. here’s a quick scene I made to demonstrate how it works. You just start typing { and the dropdown guides you through the choices.

• You can make linear storylines very easily. Also you don’t have to use the story tree, it’s totally optional. You can stay within the regular editor (pictured on the left) which is actually how it shows up by default.
• As far as debugging, Storyfall’s editor will identify if you have scenes without chapters (if you enable chapters, this is optional), and it’ll also help you identify any unreachable or orphaned scenes (e.g. scenes that are outside the main storyline and not reachable, or that don’t have any choices pointing towards them). I’ve also built in some cleanup tools so if you try to orphan a scene by deleting the last choice pointing towards it, it’ll warn you and let you reparent that scene or delete it. You can also play your drafts before they’re published.
• I added newsletters because I wanted writers to be able to build an audience and communicate with their readers. Initially I just had free subscriptions, but then I realized without a blog/newsletter feature you don’t really have a way to communicate with them. Storyfall sends out some automated notifications to subscribers like when you publish a new story or update an existing one, but I wanted to give folks more flexibility here.
• Forums were somewhat of an outgrowth of the paid subscription tiers. I was trying to think of how to enable writers to make a consistent living - not just by selling individual stories but by having a recurring income. I figured having discussion forums that you can create around draft or published stories (and optionally gate access to paid subscribers) would create incentives for readers to pay to subscribe. I also just wanted writers to have a one-stop-shop where they could basically do everything they’d need to create, distribute, and make money from their stories, instead of having to jump around between different tools and platforms.
• The AI question is one I’ve wrestled with for a few years. My initial reaction when LLMs came out was pretty negative, but I’ve since seen some benefits (though there are definitely issues too). Personally, I enjoy writing and almost never use any kind of AI assistance for that part, but I suck at drawing, always have. To me, being able to quickly generate a cover image for my story or blog post is a huge boon. The AI tools are completely optional - I wanted to give people more options. At the end of the day you can always use ChatGPT to generate whatever images or text you want and paste them into any platform.
• I added a teams feature for collaboration, so you can invite people with different roles (writer or reader) to help you write stories. Writers have the same access as the original story creators to make changes, but they can’t publish. Readers can just play previews, so if you wanted a friend to preview your story without publishing it, you can do that. You can also create team-only forums to discuss your stories with team members.
• The typewriter effect speed can be changed yes, and also disabled entirely.

Let me know if you have any other questions or thoughts!

[Encorm (N. Cormier)]

So the biggest question I have with this platform is - how do you intend to attract paying readers? My observation is that the biggest barrier to making money via IF isn’t the platforms, it’s that text-only games are hard to get people to pay for period. Choice of Games manages it by heavily curating their platform and providing very long games (generally 300k words and up) with heavily customizability and they’ve put a lot of work in building a dedicated audience. Fallen London is similarly massive and has found a different monetization model that works for them, but when Failbetter tried to extend it to a broader user-created IF platform (StoryNexus) it didn’t work out. What’s your plan for monetization, and what’s the draw for paying users over CoG or graphical video games?

[Storyfall]

You hit the nail on the head there - that is probably the biggest challenge for Storyfall. I wish I could tell you there was some obvious slam-dunk plan for how to succeed but I don’t think it’s that simple. Any new competitor has to wrestle with existing incumbent publishers like Choice of Games that have a much greater reach, money to pay writers upfront, and an existing catalogue of great games.

My plan for how to grow the platform is to provide an overall better experience across the board, for both readers and writers. I want writers to be able to come in and start writing with almost no learning curve required. The editor needs to be no-code and intuitive enough that anybody could pick it up in minutes, and master it in an hour or two.

Hopefully it’s easier and more enjoyable to write stories on Storyfall than using ChoiceScript, and hopefully the fact that writers can retain about three times as much of their revenue and keep the rights to their work is enough to draw in enough people to start building a catalogue. Plus there’s all the other benefits of having subscribers, gated forums, etc. that you just can’t do with more traditional publishers, that will hopefully keep readers engaged past the one story they came to read.

This is the challenge with any kind of marketplace business - you need buyers (readers) to attract sellers (writers), but without writers the readers have nothing to do. It’s like a chicken and egg problem, but it’s one that’s been overcome before, and I think can be again.

Storyfall’s main advantage, in my opinion, is the fact that it’s small and scrappy. I’m pretty heavily invested in making this project succeed, I’ve built a very solid technical foundation for expanding into all kinds of cool future features, and because I don’t have to navigate a bureaucracy to make the platform better, I can improve things quickly and efficiently.

As far as graphical IF - Storyfall does actually support images. We have a rich text editor, so you can embed images in scenes if you want. We don’t yet support audio, but I could add support for that if there was interest.

One cool feature I have in mind is sequels, where writers could (with permission from the original writer) branch off from other stories. Imagine a spontaneously collaborative story where one writer publishes a story, and then others branch off from it, either adding choices to existing scenes and adding new diverging branches, or continuing from where the story ended.

From a monetization standpoint, readers can pay for either a story, a chapter, or a recurring subscription - it’s actually up to the writer how they monetize. For instance, you could make the first chapter to your story free, and then have subsequent chapters be paid. There’s a lot of flexibility here and writers are free to experiment and see what works for them.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

Something that was being discussed a few days ago on a different thread about a similar startup platform—

The ideal IF design system has a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling. It should be easy to get into it and start writing, but it should have enough power that advanced users can build complex behaviors without outgrowing your system.

So: how complex can the logic be in Storyfall? At minimum, you’ll need some system for setting, altering, and checking variables; ideally, you’ll have a lot more than that.

[Encorm (N. Cormier)]

It seems to me you’re working a bit at cross purposes here. Focusing on an easy-to-use editor is a great idea, but that’s by nature going to attract newbies – not the kind of people who are going to, statistically speaking, make stories people want to pay for. And if the editor’s so simple you can master it in an hour, what’s there to attract more experienced IF devs? (Can you tinker under the hood if you want to, and will people be aware of the fact when you’re focusing so hard on the no-code aspect?) Right now it seems like it would be a good fit for people who are experienced writers and inexperienced coders, which is a small slice of the population. You’re going to need some very successful stories to kick this off too, and ideally ones that bring something to the table that can’t be gotten from free games on Itch. How do you square that circle with you, the platform owner, being largely hands-off about what gets made?

Anyway, I’m less concerned about this platform competing with Choice of Games and more speculating about the viability of broadly monetized IF, which nobody else has made work so far.

[Storyfall]

Yep, Storyfall supports variables! You can create as many as you want, keep them hidden from readers or visible in a stats page, and mutate them when choices are made. You can also have choices be conditional upon some variable having been met, or have conditional text within both scenes and choices.

I spent a lot of time trying to get the editor to support the necessary complexity required for advanced games while still being easy and intuitive to use. Obviously I’m open to feedback though on any ways to improve. I encourage folks to give it a go and let me know what they think.

I filmed a quick demo of how the variable system works below. I had to compress it quite a bit to fit into the 4mb limit so hopefully it’s still legible.

[Storyfall]

I think the low barriers to entry for both creating and publishing means more writers can create more content on Storyfall. Sure, not all of that content will be massive 300k word stories or curated to be the best, but some of it will be (hopefully). There is a rating and review system built in and you can sort by ratings, so there is a sort of community curation going on, which to be honest I prefer anyway. Who knows how much IF never saw the light of day because some editor at Choice of Games decided it wasn’t good enough? We’ll never know. I prefer letting an open marketplace “curate” stories. (Edit: though I suppose there is the Hosted Games option).

How do you think Storyfall (or any other new platform) should approach solving this? What would get you (personally) to write on Storyfall?

[Dissolved]

@Encorm

Fallen London is similarly massive and has found a different monetization model that works for them, but when Failbetter tried to extend it to a broader user-created IF platform (StoryNexus) it didn’t work out.

Diverging to the topic of commercial IF more broadly, could that at least in part be the result of SN being specialised a result of Failbetter’s design decisions in ways which hindered its success? I think that one of Short’s article on storylets stated something along the lines of SN needing high content throughput to really show the benefits of its story handling. Which seems to spell a vicious cycle for anyone not willing to commit to enough story content up front (you don’t add story content to monetise because you don’t attract enough for it to be viable, people aren’t attracted because you don’t have enough content…).

On the other hand, that could turn out to be applicable to all models of serially-monetised IF regardless of the specifics.

ETA: so the correct quote is

QBN does pose some challenges of scale at both the high and the low end. I think StoryNexus is hard on new authors because the content tends to be uninteresting until there are a fair number of storylets in the database, so it’s hard to feel like you’re really rolling until you’ve spent quite a bit of time in the tool.

From Beyond Branching: Quality-Based, Salience-Based, and Waypoint Narrative Structures – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling
So much less negative than my paraphrase and probably my paraphrase was inaccurate. Whoops.

I was also conflating it with this passage

Making a minimally playable experience with SN took ages because one had to create quite a number of storylets to arrive at anything remotely interesting: there’s a good reason why it’s easier to build onto an existing StoryNexus world than to get one started from scratch. Being able to make some core dynamics with highly reusable storylets would let a new creator get rolling much faster.

from Survey of Storylets-based Design – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

which I suppose could be read to indicate that SN failing at being extended to a broader user centred IF platform was the result of requiring significant effort “to arrive at anything remotely interesting”—so whether or not it would apply here would seem to depend on the particulars of SN vs the particulars of Storyfall.

@Encorm

Right now it seems like it would be a good fit for people who are experienced writers and inexperienced coders, which is a small slice of the population.

Maybe the idea would be to get the sorts of people who write serialised fiction and transferring that business model—taking earlier volumes down for publication and editing while leaving more recent volumes up, locking advance chapters behind Patreon-style paywalls, etc—to IF, since Twine doesn’t really support that it itself much and that isn’t really CoG’s model. But is there really an appetite for that sort of thing from the writers or readers of IF or serialised fiction? Then again, this is only my speculation, so what the Storyfall developer(s?) plan might be more credible than this?

EDIT: corrected editions to editing

[Storyfall]

Having free chapters that lead to paid ones is one of the ways writers can monetize, yes!

From my perspective as a writer, I think that’s what I will be doing for my longer story that’s currently in development. It’s likely going to take me a year or more to write, but I don’t want to wait that long to publish the earlier chapters, so my first one or two chapters will be free, and later ones may be paid.

(And yes, it’s just one developer right now, although I bounce ideas off my wife so I guess you could call her my “consultant”, haha.)

[Ivan (Ivan Cockrum)]

I’m looking at the intro game. One thing that strikes me as missing is a way to provide editorial feedback to the author from the game screen. I found some instances of jumping between past and present tense to report.

As you explored the wonderful garden, you noticed some gravel near a flowerbed was disturbed, with footprints and what looked like wheelbarrow treads that ended suddenly.

Curiosity overtakes you, and you move the gravel aside, revealing a trap door!

Suddenly, lights start to flicker all around you, and you start to get a sense of your surroundings.

…Steve’s voice rang out from every direction at once…his malevolent chuckle accentuated your predicament.

what what

The door creaks with mystery, and for a moment you hold your breath - what what you see defies all explanation.

This dialog is confusing. I’m understanding it to be telling me two contradictory things.

[Encorm (N. Cormier)]

@Storyfall

I think the low barriers to entry for both creating and publishing means more writers can create more content on Storyfall. Sure, not all of that content will be massive 300k word stories or curated to be the best, but some of it will be (hopefully).

This specifically is something you’ll want a contingency plan for. In the age of ChatGPT, one bad actor can pump out hundreds of mediocre stories in the time it takes someone else to handcraft a single chapter. Without some kind of control mechanism (and particularly one that can’t be botted) you risk the diamonds being lost in the dreck.

To be clear this is something any platform of user created material is going to deal with – Itch and Steam are both affected and dealing with it to better and worse degrees, to say nothing of the app stores and the major social media sites – but I think we’re past the age of the Internet where the good stuff will naturally float to the top. This isn’t a reason not to do it but it’s a reason to think a bit more cynically about how the platform’s going to be used so you can get out ahead of it.

[Storyfall]

Thanks for reading my demo story! I actually struggle with jumping between tenses sometimes and unfortunately I didn’t catch that instance. There is a way to leave a review on a story, but I think the kind of feedback is more for the writer and less of a general review for everyone to see.

I’m going to implement a way to provide editorial feedback, thanks for the suggestion!

That restart story dialog is confusing, you’re right. I’m trying to explain that the journal stores the history of your past play throughs, but that at the same time, restarting the story will wipe your current play through (and reset any variables). I need to explain that in a better way.

[Dissolved]

And of course, the real question to be derived from StoryNexus and Varytale is: what happens when it goes kaput?

ETA: missed the bit about JSON export

@Ivan

This dialog is confusing. I’m understanding it to be telling me two contradictory things.

Presumably something like a parser transcript being retained after a restart. But it’s horribly opaque in how it’s explained.

@Encorm

Without some kind of control mechanism (and particularly one that can’t be botted)

And of course, one probably has to balance making the story creation UI, say, unusable by bots with accessibility and ease of use by authors.

[jkj_yuio]

Some quick feedback;

Can i rearrange scenes? i can’t find a way to manually reconnect and re-arrange the way scenes are connected. Also to create a new scene on its own, then wire it into the flow somewhere.

I wanted to create a new starting scene and wire it to the original. How even do you nominate a start scene?

Also, i can’t charge $1, min seems to be $2.99

And what is “tax service” ? Seems to be a large chunk of revenue. I don’t pay tax?

Save

[Encorm (N. Cormier)]

Just realized I never answered the questions you asked. Sorry about that!

@Storyfall

How do you think Storyfall (or any other new platform) should approach solving this?

That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it. I’m not sure that this is a solveable problem since I’m just not sure that people are willing to pay money for the vast majority of IF? But if I had to give it a shot I’d say at bare minimum it needs to launch with some absolute bangers by people with recognizable names and have some mechanism to keep the slop at bay. Steam send to be faring best by providing a cost barrier up front to list games - perhaps a much lower fee for authors ($5?) should be required to monetize a game.

@Storyfall

What would get you (personally) to write on Storyfall?

I don’t personally care about making money from IF or having my games reach a large audience (so take all my previous opinions for what they’re worth). I’m also moderately proficient in Twine so the no-code approach doesn’t appeal much. But to not be a Debbie Downer, what might get me to try it out would be:

• Easy story styling – the thing I am very much not proficient in is CSS. Good looking and easily editable templates with built in QoL features (like being able to automatically skip/turn off timed text or other text effects, or dark/light mode switching) that the author doesn’t have to enable manually would be great.
• World model support out of the box, even if it’s very basic. Making a branching story in Twine can be done by a beginner with no coding experience if they follow a 15 minute YouTube tutorial! But inventories, maps, NPCs, etc are more complicated and rely on features that can and will trip up amateurs even though they’re basic elements of game design.
• Easy/automated backup in case of server problems, preferably to either my desktop or GitHub. If the site experiences data problems or ceases operation I don’t want to rely on remembering to manually export a copy every so often to archive my work.
• The ability to switch between the graphical WSYWIG editor and editing the code it represents under the hood, even if it’s in very simplified language. Nothing will frustrate me more than failing to do something in the graphical editor that I know I can do in 30 seconds of writing code.
• Built in extension/module management - there’s a ton of user created macros etc for Twine that add features you don’t get out of the box, but there’s no central location to find them and getting them to work is not always straightforward for a newbie. Letting people write their own modules and making it easy for other people to use them would be nice.

I’ll come back and add things if I think of more. Again, I’m not really the target audience for this system but I’m not sure anyone on this forum is? Most of us don’t care about monetization or advertising and most people here are decent at programming.

[Storyfall]

Great questions!

1. It’s this gear button on the right here. Click that and you can change which scene your choice connects to.

2. The starting “root” scene is fixed - it’s the only scene that is and can’t currently be re-arranged. You can still connect scenes back to the starting scene (e.g. have a loop), though I noticed if you do that, the story tree visualization gets messed up. That’s a bug I’ll fix.
3. Yeah unfortunately due to some fixed Stripe charges, if you went with a $1 price you’d barely get to keep any of it. I set $2.99 as the minimum to just to make sure writers still got a reasonable amount. The higher the price, the more you keep as a percentage due to those fixed costs.
4. Stripe Tax is basically their sales tax calculation and remittance product. As a marketplace, Storyfall is legally liable for collecting and remitting sales tax on behalf of writers. It’s called “marketplace facilitator” laws. When I first conceived of Storyfall I was going to have readers pay writers directly via Stripe, and let them handle any sales tax obligations. But when I did more research, it turns out states would still hold Storyfall accountable, so the proper way to do it is to collect tax on your behalf.

This is also why you can’t currently monetize if you’re in the EU for instance. European countries have a $0 threshold for sales tax, meaning, if even 1 person purchased a story in France, I would be legally liable to register and file for sales tax in France, and the same for all the other 27 European countries. Sales tax is apparently the bane of digital sales. Many startups don’t even bother to collect or remit and just hope to not get audited, but that didn’t seem like a wise business model to me.

[jkj_yuio]

It’s clear your system has been a lot of work. I have a suggestion.

You have three mountains to climb;

1. Make a great authoring system
2. Make a great publishing platform
3. Have great content

Right now, even if your authoring system was done (ie 1), and talented authors came along, it would still take months before any polished product was ready for sale.

Here’s what i think you should do. Pivot to:

Patreon + Itch

The payment processor fees have you over a barrel. You have to charge a min fee for games otherwise it’s all payment fees. The big kids can charge under $1 for a game and make money, but you can’t.

For a new start up, you need low cost content.

So subscription model: Customers give you, say $5 at a time of credit, which is enough to subscribe to several content channels. each $1 a month, or even less.

A content creator with a great idea can make a free pilot and two episodes and start running it, writing more episodes on the go. This gets content going fast.

Important: You must have a community channel for each content stream. If my subscribing public want character A to get romantically involved with character B, then so be it. Or perhaps character C is not liked. Well, kill him off in the next episode maybe.

On Patreon you only have simple content; pictures, sounds, files, downloads. You can’t do this with games because those downloads or links could appear elsewhere any time.

Important: You can only play the game subscribed after logging in. The links can’t work outside and cannot be shared (Itch doesn’t do this for web games which means it cant charge for web content).

Also, I think this is crucial: Find a way to also host HTML games with the same subscription model. With this, you can be up and running with some quality content really fast.

[Dissolved]

@Storyfall

Having free chapters that lead to paid ones is one of the ways writers can monetize, yes!

From my perspective as a writer, I think that’s what I will be doing for my longer story that’s currently in development. It’s likely going to take me a year or more to write, but I don’t want to wait that long to publish the earlier chapters, so my first one or two chapters will be free, and later ones may be paid.

This is largely the opposite of what I was talking about—aside from Patreon—because I was also thinking about the inverse kind of thing you see on, say, Royal Road where earlier volumes are taken down to be published via KU while later volumes are left up. Now, this is in part the result of KU/KDP Select’s exclusivity rules, but it is regularly done and, presumably, if it wasn’t a successful monetisation strategy it wouldn’t happen.

@Storyfall

Readers need accounts to play. There’s some limited functionality I built into the landing page to preview the demo story without logging in, but it’s not a complete experience.

This seems a bit of an odd choice, to say the least—even on, say, Webnovel you don’t need to login to view free chapters, and this seems like it could be a bit of a sticking point when it comes to attracting readers from that sort of sector, if that’s what your aiming for. And IF readers do not seem likely to bite for this either—even CoG fans don’t need to login to anything to view the free demo of one of their games online.

@Hidnook

What does it do that Twine, Ink, Choice of Games, etc. struggles with?

Is the opposite question—What does Twine, etc. make hard but this make impossible?—not also relevant here?

For that matter given that ChoiceScript (Storyfall’s dev doesn’t mention experience with any other tool) AFAIK doesn’t handle some things that Twine makes easy—such as inline links which replace text (at least, no CoG game I ever played had that—correct me if I’m wrong)—and given how Storyfall is (presumably) less amenable to inserting JS to make up for that (although that would still be a PITA for ChoiceScript users), then there could be a class of things that Twine makes easy and Storyfall makes impossible.

@Encorm

Most of us don’t care about monetization or advertising

And even among the hypothetical demographic who do, one can imagine more easily their thoughts would be “I wish I could monetise my existing Twine games more easily” than “I wish I had to deal with a whole new incompatible platform just to monetise my choice-based writing”