Creating a new interactive fiction creation website

Technical Development Development Systems
1

Hi there, my name is Dennis and I’m currently implementing a website named “ITales” on which you can create and play interactive fiction games. I know there are already a plenty of other sites out there which are aiming in a similar direction but I started this project as a hobby project to sharpen my skills and to create a site I would like to use to create an interesting story.

What is this site about?
It is a website where you can create complex, interactive stories with multiple branches in a tree-like structure. You can create nodes and connections between nodes. There are different kinds of nodes you can create:

Story nodes: These nodes contain the story text parts. Each story node has a specific type (image display, instruction following, show plain text). Image display story node allows you to upload an image and it will be shown at this point in the story. Instruction following nodes are AI nodes which formulate the text part given some instructions (Guardrails, so that the LLM doesn’t go off topic). Plain text nodes which show simply the written text ofthe autor at this point. If the parent node is an interaction node, then you can select the interaction result (decision or dialogue class) for which the story node should continue the story.

Interaction nodes: These nodes contain the information about the interactions the player can take at a certain point. There are of course different kinds of interactrions. Decisions are the classical “select a option” approach to steer the story in different directions. But there are already dialogues integrated. In an dialogue interaction you can speak with another character of the story (controlled by an LLM, but guided through instructions from the autor). As the autor you can define different outcomes of the conversation and an AI model will classify the dialogue in the predefined categories (then the story continues the specific path).
For each decision you create you can decide if there should be in item dependency. If yes you can select the item the path for this choice should depend on. If the protagonist (player) has that item, then the option is unlocked and the player can select it.

Item managing nodes: In these nodes you can add or subtract certain items from the inventory of the defined characters. Items are importand for unlocking paths.

Quest nodes (currently still under development): As you might guess in these nodes you can define quests for the player (get an item, find the right term, find the right path). If the player completes a quest he can get a reward (item).

How does the character system look like?
You can define as many characters as you want and each character has a name, job, background, personality, external goals und internal goals. You can upload images for each character as well.

How does the item creation look like?
You can create items with a description and an image. Optionally you can upload a content image for each item. This can be used for certain riddle elements or for any useful additional information.

I am curious if you might be interested in such kind of interactive fiction creation website. I think I can start with a testing phase pretty soon and if you are interested in testing, please let me know.

P.S. Unfortunately, I can’t add any screenshots to show what it looks like at the moment.

3 Likes
2

As you read and participate on the forum after your account is at least 24 hours old, you’ll gain trust and be able to include links and screenshots.

3

Hello, and welcome to the site!

Historically, the big thing that attracts people to a new IF authoring tool is seeing a cool, splashy game made with it and going “huh, I want to make something like that”. I’d encourage you to either make a cool debut game yourself, or partner with someone to make one, and enter it in one of the big comps; right now, the next one I’d recommend aiming for would be ECTOCOMP, which takes submissions through the end of October and focuses on spooky/Halloween-themed games.

(That said, I’m not sure what ECTOCOMP’s policy on LLMs will be this year. I’m not sure when we’ll see that announced.)

5 Likes
4

The organizer of Ectocomp has confirmed that this year will have a no-AI policy.

7 Likes
5

Ah, that bodes ill for my plan then—that means IFComp is the only major comp left that allows live-AI games, and your first opportunity to enter that would be next July.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of AI or games that use it, but I do also think it’s worth having a venue to experiment with them and see if anyone comes up with brilliant new uses. (Ideally using models with less plagiarism.) Maybe one will arise next year to fill this gap.

3 Likes
6

Thanks for the info. I understand the skepticism towards pure AI-generated content. I felt the same way when I was browsing pure AI-based IF websites and playing stories. They were monotonous and not really exciting. It quickly became boring, which is why I wanted to create my own site where the use of AI is completely optional. You can create classic IF games on it without using any AI components at all. But if you want, you can use an AI assistant during the writing process or insert AI nodes. AI is really only a small part of the site. The main focus is on the intuitive tree-based structure for complex, multi-branched IF stories, the new interaction possibilities, and, in the future, the ability to insert small mini-games as puzzle elements.

7

In which case what @Draconis said still applies: there are enough people offering new IF systems that you’ll need to write a compelling story that showcases the advantages of the system to get anyone to take it seriously. But if it’s possible to use your system to produce an AI-free piece of work you’ll probably find a larger proportion of this community who are interested in engaging with it, and have more options for contests that you could enter it into (entering contests is the most common way to get visibility and community engagement for your work here).

1 Like
8

Thats right. Currently I’m working on a story to showcase the site and its capabilities. If it is finished I would like to invite some testers of this community to test is out (finding bugs, mitigate weaknesses, …). But if it is done I will create a post on this forum calling for testers.

9

In what sense the no-ai policy prevents you from participating? Thanks.

10

I feel like Daniels role is to say this to all new entrants to this space and mine is to double down and say I wish that I had paid more attention myself, because he is totally right on this :grinning_face:. Getting people to try new things is hard, no matter how good they are.

2 Likes
11

Not me personally, but I had just recommended ECTOCOMP as a way of showing off this new system, which has an AI component.

1 Like
12

Hi, I am currently implementing a website for creating and playing interactive fiction games. Choices and Dialogues are already included and I’m thinking about to add other interaction types as well.

My ideas are:

- Adding picture minigames like finding the right places in an image or placing items at the right position.

- Adding a 3D-Scene or 3D minigame. For example finding the way through a maze or find things in a room …

What do you think about it? Might that be interesting or do you have other ideas?

13

How does the creation website handle the topic of Copyright, with regards to sending the Author’s potentially copywrite-ed Story (and code?) content to an LLM that might be using that information as future training material.

2 Likes
14

The backend of the site currently uses LLMs hosted on Azure OpenAI. The data and privacy rules of Azure made clear that they dont use the input data to improve their models https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-foundry/responsible-ai/openai/data-privacy?tabs=azure-portal

The same goes for the models of Anthropic https://privacy.anthropic.com/en/articles/10023580-is-my-data-used-for-model-training

15

This sounds really exciting. If an actual game ever emerges, I can’t wait for my AI-powered game-player to try it.

7 Likes
16

The game I‘m currently working on will contain only a few ai components, because I‘m not a fan of purely ai generated content as well. AI could make dialogues feel more lively but all of the other story texts are handwritten, to ensure the story doesn’t go in wrong directions. So maybe you can let your ai-player play for himself and give the game a try yourself :wink:

17

To illustrate how the site might look like, here are some screenshots:

1
12423×1200 188 KB

The creation page on which create new stories in a dynamic adjustable tree view.

3.PNG
3.PNG2013×1190 161 KB

The character creation tab

2
22446×1121 255 KB

This is the place where you can write the text for a specific story node

18

I think the community should go for an “only AI” jam or anual competition.

3 Likes
19

To me, the draw of generative ai is being able to see something novel. It’s not necessarily the best, but it’s new(ish). The other strength is it easily integrates natural language processing. In that sense, I think it would be cool in the interaction nodes to be able to really freely interact with the situation/npc and let the LLM figure out a novel response (within the author’s guidelines of course). In that respect, the LLM becomes sort of a DM and in the DND sense, there are still story “rails”, but there is more freedom in how the player navigates that. AIDungeon does this, albeit, poorly in my opinion in a similar way fashion.

I think it would be really cool if you implemented some sort of memory, like if you do something in one node, make note of that and then bring it up in another story node or interactive node. Or even if the player character mentions liking something, find a way to bring it up later or something like that.

It might even be worth it to come up with your own framework. Maybe stats or something the player could get and then the author could assign to interactive nodes, like challenges. And like if there is a guard, the user could try and talk their way through, and the LLM would know to check their Charisma and maybe rate what they say for bonuses or negatives (you learned somewhere the guard likes ducks so mentioning that gives you a bonus? or something like that). If you choose to punch the guard, it’s a Strength check and so on. That might be a bit ambitious, but it would be cool.