I’ve been working on a web-based interactive fiction platform and I’d love feedback from authors who actually know what they’re doing.
What it is:
A free, browser-based player for IF stories. You upload your story file (Twine HTML, Z-machine .z3,.z5, .z8, Glulx .ulx/.gblorb, ChoiceScript, or Dialog .aastory), and it gets a shareable link that anyone can play in their browser without needing to download or install anything. Z-machine and Glulx stories run through Parchment/Quixe inside the player.
What I’m hoping to learn:
Does the player work with your stories? I’ve tested with Photopia, Anchorhead, Lost Pig, Counterfeit Monkey, and Cragne Manor, but I know there are edge cases I haven’t hit.
Is the upload flow clear? You drag and drop a file, fill in a title and description, and publish.
What’s missing that would make this actually useful to you as an author?
What it’s not:
This isn’t a replacement for IFDB or the IF Archive. It’s more like a “play and share” layer (e.g. itch.io for multiple IF types), with discovery and analytics. Working on allowing authors to get a simple analytics dashboard showing how readers interact with their story (where they drop off, which branches they explore, completion rates).
The platform is at Liminal . You can browse and play what’s there, or upload your own from the Create page.
A few things I’m specifically unsure about:
The Z-machine player currently runs through Parchment. Are there specific interpreter features that authors rely on that I should make sure work (e.g., graphics, sound, specific screen models)?
For Glulx stories — are there blorb resource requirements I might be missing?
Is the “community submission” pattern okay? I uploaded a few classic titles (with attribution and a note that they’ll be taken down if the author asks) to have something playable. Is that overstepping?
I’m a solo builder and genuinely trying to make something useful for the IF community, not trying to monetize other people’s work. Any feedback, including “this already exists and it’s called X, but if you build Y then that would be better” is extremely helpful.
But it appears that you are trying to monetize the service, is that right? I see the “continue with a wallet” option which seems to be a cryptocurrency-based registration system, which I infer to mean that you plan to charge for the service. I hope I’m misunderstanding, but my impression is that you’ve uploaded other people’s games to your commercial site without their permission, to use as teaser content or a sort of loss leader to get users to sign up for your commercial service. Again I hope I’m misreading, but this comes across to me as super sketchy.
Counterfeit monkey and cragne manor do not run on my android pad. Other games come up, but the text is on the left half of the screen. It would be nicer to use the actual width and be able to increase font size.
Context:
As you’ll see when you clicked on any of the uploads that were from IFDB, I labelled them all “Community Submission”, and have the same Note at the bottom that:
I will not monetize another person’s work.
If the author(s) request that I take down their version, we will take it down.
Note: All of the works screenshotted were freeware (you can double-check the IFDB link in each of the links), which was why I chose them as examples.
Minor nit: Z-machine and “Inform” are not synonyms. ZIL, Dialog, and possibly others also create Z-machine executables. Glulx and “Inform” are not synonyms, either.
At the moment, Å-machine does mean “Dialog” (but not necessarily the reverse), but nothing prevents some other language from also producing valid Å-machine games in the future.
Games should be opt-in, not opt-out. The games you’ve selected are free but are not freeware. You may have the best of intentions here, but you should first seek and gain permission to load other people’s games.
Do you mean “freeware but not FOSS”? I think “freeware” generally just means that you don’t have to pay, regardless of copyright status.
As an aside, I’m kinda suspicious about the choice of the phrase “community submission” for pre-existing works uploaded by the platform creator. That kinda seems like the opposite of what I would interpret that phrase as meaning.
By which, I take it you mean, that you uploaded them and labeled yourself as “community”. That doesn’t make them community submissions.
But you haven’t answered the question: is this website offering a monetized service? Why is its login backed by a crypto-wallet system?
Exactly this. You should contact authors before putting their work on your site, especially if it’s a commercial site, regardless of whether you’re charging for access to these particular games.
I’m less immediately suspicious here than others seem to be; it’s not necessarily obvious why uploading games from the IF Archive to another platform would be a problem, while something like IFDB or IPlayIF isn’t. Those don’t technically host the games, they only link to the games on the Archive and elsewhere, and provide a convenient frontend, and that’s (legally) important.
But yes, if you’re hosting the story files yourself, licensing is a concern. Counterfeit Monkey is fine (it’s released under CC-BY-SA), while the licensing on Cragne Manor is probably such a headache it can probably never be hosted anywhere except the Archive. (It was a decade ago, but I don’t remember signing anything about the license; I think it was just vaguely assumed that if we were contributing to the game, we were fine with whatever distribution terms Ryan put on it.)
Unfortunately, most games on the IF Archive aren’t released under any particular license—the Archive started before most amateur IF authors were particularly concerned about copyright and licensing. By uploading to the Archive, you (explicitly) give them permission to host and distribute the game, but that permission doesn’t necessarily extend to anyone else. That’s why IFDB hosts cover art and reviews, but not games—it only hosts links to games.
I’ve been trying to explicitly attach licenses to everything I release (basically all of them are dual-licensed CC-BY and MIT), but it’s not a standard practice here. When we wanted to incorporate existing Dialog games into the compiler test suite, we ended up just contacting the authors individually and asking “hey could you explicitly license this to us under a Creative Commons or free software license so we can put it in the repository”.
This does mean, as an aside, that people are welcome to put my games on whatever platforms they want, and even charge money for them. It’s kind of rude to make money off my work without asking me first, but rudeness isn’t a crime. The only thing you can’t do is take credit for it (you have to credit me as the author). And I’m not the only person who releases IF under a permissive license; it’s a bit of work to find them, but there are a bunch of other games on IFDB with similar rules.
Why do I do it this way? Well, as an academic, the authorship credit is more important to me than the money, and as an educator, I want people to be able to learn from my source code. (And as a contributor to free software projects, too!) If people play Wise-Woman’s Dog, go “hey that automap is cool, I want to put something like that in my own game”, and are able to copy it from my source code, that leads to more good IF in the world—they can spend more time writing and debugging their cool new game instead of reimplementing the automap from scratch.
Saying “you’re welcome to incorporate parts of my source code into your own games, even if you plan on selling those games, but you can’t sell my game” is a lot trickier (legally) than saying “do whatever you want with it, just give me credit”. It’s possible (Hadean Lands is licensed this way), but for my purposes, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze—unlike Hadean Lands, I’m not making any money off these games anyway!
I noticed that your site doesn’t include any Terms of Service or content Licensing related information regarding what rights if any are expected to be granted / given by or transferred from the IF project’s "Author’ to the site when a project is uploaded to it.
Such legal statements or clarifications are common on any site where copyrighted third-party content is being uploaded and hosted on it.
I understand you’ve stated that you don’t intend to monetize the content uploaded to / hosted by the site, and I’m not questioning that statement. But by uploading content to a hosting site without such legal arrangements between the “Author” and the site, it does leave a potential loop hole were others can down load that content for usage not permitted by the “Author”.
Hey all, I hear the feedback; last night I archived the community submissions and have started reaching out to the authors one by one, to see if they’re comfortable with the works being on the site.
@PatientRock I agree with you, which is why they’ve been taken down. For clarification’s sake; I read the license that was posted on the IFDB, and all of them were either Freeware or Creative Commons.
@Draconis I see what you’re saying; thanks for elucidating!
@Greyelf good flag, hadn’t gotten a chance to write ToS.
My understanding of copyright and licensing in the context of writing software was “if there’s no license, all rights are reserved by the original creator.” So in the case of someone uploading their work, but not mentioning their license in the description, I’d assume they’d reserve all rights to their work.
In either case, I’ll take a look at borogove and IFDB. If other folks have good examples, I’m all ears!
