IF Resource Links

Giant List of Links to Resources

Last Update:
2023-11-23T00:00:00Z
This post is a wiki and may be edited by any of our regular users.

Please be aware of and observe any licensing guidelines (such as credit requirements) for all resources as individually specified on their respective websites.


Archival/Cataloging

The Interactive Fiction Database

The Interactive Fiction Database is an IF game catalog and recommendation engine. IFDB is a Wiki-style community project: members can add new game listings, write reviews, exchange game recommendations, and more.

IFArchive

The Archive’s mission is to preserve the history and practice of interactive fiction and make it freely available to the public. Since 1992, the Archive has collected thousands of text adventures, text adventure development tools, articles, essays, hint files, walkthroughs, jokes, and sly references to Greek politics. It also preserves the history of IF institutions such as the IF Competition and IFDB. This cultural memory is one of the foundations of the IF community.

IFWiki

The Interactive Fiction Wiki

philome.la: free twine hosting (*No longer hosting new games.)

News, Articles, Blogs

PlanetIF

Planet IF is your one-stop Interactive Fiction blog aggregator collecting the latest information from the community.

The Digital Antiquarian

A history of computer entertainment and digital culture by Jimmy Maher
Extensively-researched articles with behind the scenes details about the golden age of Adventure/IF games and the companies behind them, including Infocom, Sierra, and many more.

The Rosebush

The Rosebush will be a free online magazine dedicated to publishing longer form articles about interactive fiction. The interactive fiction community already has well-established channels for reviews of individual games, and several people have well-read blogs, but we’ve been lacking a good platform for in-depth analyses, theory articles, discussions of craft, interviews, historical pieces, and so on. The Rosebush aims to be this platform. It will publish substantial articles that increase our understanding of interactive fiction, from individual works to design patterns, community structures and historical trends. The intended audience consists of both players and authors of IF.

Gold Machine

Drew Cook’s Gold Machine is a blog dedicated to textual and narrative analysis of interactive fiction, with a specific focus on Infocom’s games from the 1980s.

Brass Lantern

Articles about Interactive Fiction. No longer updated.

sub-Q

Interactive magazine for interactive fiction. No longer active.

The Classic Adventurer

The Classic Adventurer is a bookazine dedicated to the golden era of text adventures.

ChoiceBeat

ChoiceBeat is the visual novel and interactive fiction zine. This publication covers text-heavy, choice-heavy digital games from around the world.

Art, Sound, Music, Tools for Authors/Creators

Creative Commons (CC) License Information

https://creativecommons.org/

Pixlr

A free simple online utility to edit and resize images with layers, plus filters and other effects.

Trizbort: The Interactive Fiction Mapper

View project on GitHub

Browser version of Trizbort for all systems:

Interactive Fiction Mapper

by Gonzalo Garramuno
An IF mapper written in Ruby that runs natively on Linux, Windows and OSx

Dungeon Scrawl

City Generator

Sound Image

Pexels - Royalty-free images

The best free stock photos & videos shared by talented creators. (Some searches may include images that are not free to use, please browse responsibly!)

Free Game Icons

An ever growing collection of free game icons (CC BY 3.0 license)

freesound.org

Freesound is a collaborative database of Creative Commons Licensed sounds. Browse, download and share sounds.

Big Impact Sound

bigimpactsound.be

Provides music and sound design for media, games, movies, trailers, commercials, YouTube, exhibits, corporate projects and so much more.
Bespoke Music Custom-made music and sound design that will maximize the impact of your project. Stock Music (Library Music) Fast and easy browsing of pre-made and ready to use music in our huge music library.

Game Hosting and Publishers

borogove

Free hosting service for Interactive Fiction games. Games must be either parser system story files or HTML files.
Currently supported file formats: HTML (including Twine and Texture), Z-Machine (Inform, Dialog, ZIL), Glulx (Inform), .gam, .t3 (TADS), HEX (Hugo), Å-Machine (Dialog), Ink JSON files.
Game uploads can be public or private.

textadventures.co.uk

A community of interactive fiction game makers and players.
All games here are either playable in your web browser, or as an app for your smartphone or tablet. Almost all are free, and you can even make your own, using our free software - Quest or Squiffy. Other types of games may be uploaded to their catalog, specifically .gblorb, .html, and others.
Quest - Quest - Write text adventure games and interactive stories
Squiffy - Squiffy - A simple way to write interactive fiction

logo

Choice of Games LLC is dedicated to producing high-quality, text-based, multiple-choice games. We have developed a simple scripting language for writing text-based games, ChoiceScript, which we make available to others for use in their projects, and we host games produced by other designers using ChoiceScript on our website.

itch.io

Free game hosting with powerful analytics and discoverability, customizable game frontend landing pages with free in-browser play for HTML games, message boards, storefront for accepting donations or for-pay downloads, devlogs, and private release/testing modes. There is a wealth of IF with an active built-in audience for all types of games and more.

StoryStylus - One More Story Games

A unique map-based choice story creation engine with hot spots, and hosting (free trial then requires subscription, this is a proprietary game creation system)

StoryStylus - https://storystylus.com/

Standalone Authoring Engines / Tools

List of stable authoring systems

IFWiki’s list of authoring systems that are currently stable. Also check out IFWiki’s other lists, for example, Authoring systems for choice-based IF, Authoring systems for parser-based IF, Authoring systems for browsers, Authoring systems for Mac, Authoring systems for Windows, and more.

Adrift

PC only parser creation system requiring no coding with games playable cross-platform with specific interpreters or browser hosting

Adventuron

A parser & choice & hybrid engine with web-based editor that has a colorful retro vibe. Targets web & mobile (via HTML export).

Adventuron also target 8-bit platforms such as ZX Spectrum, ZX Spectrum Next (255 colour graphics supported) & more (in 8-bit compatibility mode).

User Guide: Adventuron User Guide
Editor (requires desktop browser): Adventuron Classroom
Adventuron links

Axma Story Maker

A powerful self-contained Twine alternative (AXMA 6.1) and the newest fully-JavaScript implementation (JS)
JS https://axma.info/
6.1 https://sm.axmasoft.com/

ChoiceScript

(Free for non-commercial use, negotiate with Choice of Games for commercial publishing with them or independently)

CoffeeMud

CoffeeMud provides both the foundation and the tools with which the host can create and host a text-based Multi-User-Dungeon–a gathering place for players all over the internet to congregate for the purpose of adventuring.

CSIDE - ChoiceScript IDE

A powerful community-developed authoring environment for ChoiceScript including editing, file management, instant compile for playtesting, and official CS integrated auto-play test routines.

Choose Your Story

A simple browser-based utility to create and share choice stories with an inventory system on their website

Dialog

A modern parser system with concise code similar to Prolog, in active development.

Fungus

Fungus is a free, open source tool for writers, illustrators, animators and game designers–especially visual novel & interactive fiction authors–creating interactive storytelling games in Unity 3D. Fungus is designed to be easy to learn for beginners to Unity 3D, especially for people with no coding experience.

Gruescript

Gruescript is a tool for creating point-and-click text adventures which feel like classic ‘puzzlebox’ games while eliminating the need for the player to type, making the games friendly to modern devices and players. You build your game online and download it as a playable HTML page, which you can host on your own itch.io site or elsewhere.

Guncho

A tool to implement an Inform 7 game as a multiplayer MUD

Inform 7

Inform 7 makes it easy to create text adventures of Infocom quality and beyond with a naturally-readable coding language favored by writers. Includes a complete IDE with two included manuals and a built-in library of community-authored extensions with solutions for common and unique implementation tasks.

Glimmr

Advanced graphics tools and extensions for Inform 7 games - no longer developed.

Inform 6

Inform 6 is the base-language Inform 7 compiles to and may be more suitable to experienced programmers and coders.

Ink / Inky

The powerful scripting language behind Inkle Studio’s Heaven’s Vault, 80 Days and Sorcery! (Middleware with Unity integration and JSON web exportability via the Inky editor.)

Calico

An alternate web-player for games written in Ink

Inklewriter

The new version of inklewriter is now at inklewriter.com, and it is now open source!

Your existing account will not carry over into the new version of inklewriter. You will need to make a new account. If you have data on the old version of inklewriter that you need to rescue and transition over, then please read this blog post for details of how to import old stories into the new version.

InquisitorIF

Inquisitor is an Interactive Fiction engine built for use in both a browser-based and standalone form, built around putting spaces at the core of a hypertext work. A combination of Twine and Aliceffekt’s Paradise if you will, designed to expand on the strengths of both as well as provide a pleasant reading experience.

INSTEAD

Russian-developed choice system, English documentation is available.

Ren’Py

The free visual-novel engine most commonly used by professional and indie designers.

Sadako

https://github.com/Tayruh/sadako/

Sadako is a JavaScript library for creating hyperlink-based interactive fiction using a scripting language that is merger of Twine’s passage and markup system and Ink’s choice based system. The engine itself is designed to be customizable enough that it can produce anything from a standard Twine-like game, to a visual novel, to a dialogue system to be placed inside another game framework

TADS

A parser creation coding system.

Twine

The original choice-based engine widely used for creation, dialogue organization, and narrative prototyping
Twine Resources List

Sugarcube - a popular Twine format

Texture

Choice engine well-suited for tablet play and development

Undum

A beautiful advanced choice-based system

Raconteur - utilities that simplfy Undum creation

Visual Novel Maker

A commercial visual novel creation system from the developers of RPG Maker

Vorple

A high-powered multimedia online interpreter for Inform 7 with hooks to take advantage of browser capabilities

WrittenRealms

Browser based MUD creator with multiplayer and RPG trappings (stats, weapons, armor)
https://writtenrealms.com/

ZILF

ZILF is a set of tools for working with ZIL (the Zork Implementation Language [1]), including a ZIL compiler, ZAP assembler, and ZIL libraries for writing text adventure games.

Competitions

The Interactive Fiction Competition

Discussion here: IFComp - The Interactive Fiction Community Forum

An annual celebration of new, text-driven digital games and stories from independent creators.

Spring Thing

Discussion here: Spring Thing - The Interactive Fiction Community Forum

Spring Thing is an annual online festival celebrating new interactive fiction from all kinds of people. Everyone is welcome!

IntroComp

Discussion here: IntroComp - The Interactive Fiction Community Forum

IntroComp is an annual competition where participants develop excerpts of interactive fiction, gain feedback from audience reactions, and use this feedback to release a fantastic final product.

Theory and Practice


12 Likes

Added WrittenRealms to list.

I have updated the Resource list with some descriptions and hopefully sorted them into somewhat useful categories. Please check and update - the original post is a wiki that is editable by anyone. Include any useful resources not listed!

2 Likes

I’ve added Fungus, CoffeeMUD, and Sadako to the list.

2 Likes

Thank you! :pray:

Edit: I updated the description to Sadako.

Hello,

I see that Adventuron is on this list, but I think the description is perhaps not correct.

“An easy choice game system with a colorful retro vibe.”

I’d suggest the following (feel free to edit):

“An easy browser based parser/choice engine and editor with a colorful retro vibe. Targets web, mobile, and 8-bit platforms.”

May I also request that you change your link to this:

https://adventuron.io/documentation

Thanks so much,

Chris

2 Likes

@adventuron - I’ve bumped your trust level to 3 which should give you permission to edit the original post - which is set a wiki and should be editable by anyone at regular level 3. Let me know if you aren’t able to access it.

Thanks so much, I’ve done this now. Let me know if I did anything wrong. Happy to correct / revert.

1 Like

Looks good! I went in and updated the date at the top of the wiki.

There’s a button for this - highlight the inserted date and hit the calendar icon (the second to last one in the image before the gear) to insert the current date.

Screenshot 2020-05-30 01.26.15

How does “Game Hosting” vs “Standalone Authoring” work – what is the important distinction?

For example, StoryStylus is listed as Game Hosting, while inkewriter and texturewriter are listed as standalone authoring. But all three seem to be server-side authoring platforms that also provide their own direct publish / hosting (although I haven’t tried StoryStylus).

I believe my reasoning was “is the hosting required or a major feature of the platform?”

Things may have changed since I made arbitrary categories, which is why I made the post a Wiki so others can update it.

Ah, I think I got it. So, for example, TextureWriter lets you export and run as a standalone html without the server – but StoryStylus doesn’t.

1 Like

Added Dungeon Scrawl - a flexible and beautiful dungeon mapping tool.

See also: City Generator by the same author.

1 Like

I changed two things in the main wiki-post:

  • The line about IFDB moving to the new address in the near future to has moved to
  • Dialog is no longer “a serious conDender to Inform 7” but a “conTender”.
2 Likes

I added links to some of IFWiki’s new automatically-generated lists of authoring systems.

3 Likes

I’ve added this post in the links for Twine

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In the “News, Articles, Blogs” section, neither the Brass Lantern link nor the sub-Q link is working for me. (Brasslantern.org is still up, but that’s not the site the post links to.) Should I take them off?

4 Likes

As far as I can recall, the most relevant Brass Lantern publication (the OG, so to speak) has always been located at the address you mention, http://brasslantern.org/, so that’s the one that should be in the resources post, I think.

Regarding the address which is currently linked in the post, https://paper.li/TheRealDominia/1431551157#/, the Internet Archive doesn’t seem to have captured any substantial part of the content there: https://web.archive.org/web/20161117065228/http://paper.li:80/TheRealDominia/1431551157.

About sub-Q, I don’t know, maybe we can link to an archived version of the last frontpage: August 2020 Issue - sub-Q Magazine or to this archived page listing the back issues: Back Issues - sub-Q Magazine.

2 Likes

I added The Classic Adventurer and ChoiceBeat to the “News, Articles, Blogs” section.

4 Likes