DepthTale is a platform that allows you to create and play visual interactive adventures. Our format is a blend of classic text adventure, visual novel, and point-and-click mechanics.
With DepthTale, you can import your IF project into our editor and create all the necessary assets to turn it into a complete visual interactive game, including images, videos, animations, and sound effects. We also handle the publishing process, ensuring that once your project is ready, it will be distributed across the web, as well as on Android and iOS.
We have recently launched our creator program and are looking to sponsor a select group of creators. This includes covering the costs of asset creation and promoting your project afterward. If you have an existing IF project or are currently working on one, please reach out to us! We would love to take a look at your work (you can contact us via email at hello@depthtale.com).
For more information about the program (payout, IP rights, …) or the editor, you can find all the details on our notion wiki.
Thank you for your time! Any questions or feedback you may have are welcome.
Charges authors and readers for the privilege of using their platform (and of course their image generation). You would think they’d be happy to get free content, but then again, why would they, in our brave new AI-powered world? Far safer to go down the vanity publishing road.
Yes, unfortunately if you want more feedback from this part of the Internet, it should be free, or, at the very least, have a demo version that does not require a signup.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I get the anti-AI reaction, but if I may clarify a few things.
We’re just integrating AI services so creators can use them, we’re not making money on that. As I mentioned in the previous message, we even offer to cover assets cost creation for the program launch.
Regarding the cost for readers, it’s up to the creators to decide how much they want to sell their work (could be free). We have the same business model as any marketplace, so the platform can be sustainable, and we can support creators and the platform’s promotion.
Many interactive fiction projects choose the full AI generation path, removing creators completly from the loop. We deeply believe in human creation and see AI only as a tool.
Most of the content on the platform is free to read.
There’s also free credits to try out the editor.
Not requiring sign-up is unfortunately a technical restriction.
Okay, it seems some things need spelling out. On sign-up they offer 30 free Tokens but they are also saying it will take about 170 Tokens for a typical story. That’s actually even worse, since they are thereby trapping authors in their vendor-locked-in plattform with a half-finished work to then charge them.
I don’t think I need to comment on the claim that they are not making any money with this.
The 30 tokens are just to play with the editor; we can’t offer a full episode cost at this point, but maybe we’ll be able to later on. We also plan to offer ways to get some more credits for specific events.
Again, we’re not making money on that, you can check that by looking at image generation provider pricing (leonardo, openai …) and compare with us.
While there’s no export option at this point, it’s something we’re considering. The main blocker is that we have an in-house player we developed to play the stories that we would need to open-source. We might still do it if the community demand is strong. The landscape of interactive fiction is very competitive on mobile, and we want to keep some assets for ourselves at least for the beginning.
I feel like even with these clarifications, I won’t be able to convince you that easily, but that’s ok, I get that trust must be earned.
Full transparency, I’m a solo developer working on that for over a year. I just love interactive fiction and I want to make something useful and sustainable for everyone.
You start your first post with “we” and “our” and now claim to be a solo developer, as an anonymous user on an internet messageboard. Whatever, I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
It is not uncommon for vanity publishing to just offload the cost to authors. This way there is no risk involved for the publisher, and a small chance of actually making some money out if it. That makes it a bit less, but still clearly exploitative. I realise standards have been slipping for some time, so you may have more luck in other corners of the internet, with generally younger target audiences, where such a way of doing business may be more common. And who knows, maybe you will even find authors on this board? No harm in trying.
But think about this: If you’re a solo developer, all it takes is one state-funded Saudi Whale amongst your readers. The costs you offload to authors is peanuts compared to what these teenagers with (by law) nothing better to do will wash into your income stream.
I started using “we” because my brother gave me a hand at some point, but I’m running the project by myself as of now.
The intent of the tokens system for AI services usage was more to manage my runway than to do vanity publishing. While I have some runway to run the project for a decent amount of time, I can’t support the cost of, say hundred creators at the same time. Also, when you provide unlimited free services, there’s always abuse that can lead to drastic costs, unfortunately.
That being said, I can support the creation’s cost for a limited group of creators at the moment, that’s what I was referring to in my first message.
Again, the model of the project is more of a marketplace than a publishing editor. The goal is to make it easy for creators to create visually appealing interactive fiction projects and help them reach a wide audience.
Welcome! The IF community has an abundance of tools and authoring systems (most of them free and open source). For any new system to stand out it really needs an “admirable game” - a well written and engaging game, ideally released into one of the annual competitions. Others in the community will usually only check out a new system when they see a game they love and want to try to do something similar.
Hey this looks interesting. I tried to create a story with AI, but it wasn’t actually helping me to create the story. I had to create the scenes and descriptions myself as well as the choices. It did make me some nice pictures.
Am i missing something on how to use the AI for the actual story? Thanks.
If you want to use text assistance (for choice, description…), you can click the “Ask AI” button, on the top right corner, in the first step. Type what you want in the input and hit the “send” button next to it.
Alternatively you can click “get suggestions” and pick one of them.