Hi everyone! I have created a website (and accompanying software, above) for creating and playing works of interactive fiction with NO CODING required. I am looking for feedback, suggestions, improvements, etc. I would like for the “universe” to eventually be very populated by users and games, and so I am trying to make everything clean and easy to use.
There is already a lack of instructions… so I already have considered a video tutorial with timestamps or something. Any feedback is much appreciated.
I like the ambition. Fablement (www.fablement.com) attempted something similar based on a no-code engine that was just for choice-based interactive fiction (more like a gamebook). As the games grew, though, I found the interface intractable so the prologue gamebook-style adventure I wrote over there will be migrated across to my website at some point before getting finished (but one project at a time…).
I had a little sortie of the games on ifSpace and there seemed to be some basic parser interactions missing. For example, I couldn’t abbreviate EXAMINE to just X and I had to take the key before I could examine it (I didn’t get much further than that). I’m assuming the lexicon is extensible, though, as most games will require thematic or situational extensions to the basic verbs list.
I’ve also created an account to check out the creation engine, although I didn’t get very far with that as without instructions, I wasn’t sure how to create my game logic. I did notice that there’s no IN and OUT directions, though. In-app documentation and/or a YouTube video tutorial channel would be great.
I guess as a proper test, I’d probably attempt to recreate my tutorial adventure in it - it’s about as simple as text adventures get, so if it can handle that, then you’d have something that’s a go-er. When your engine is ready for a proper test, let me know and I’ll have a go at recreating my tutorial using it.
But I don’t want this post to sound overly critical - what you have created looks great and will really help people that want to write text adventures but struggle to code. It’s exactly this kind of thinking that will keep our hobby fresh and accessible to a new audience. I had wondered about whether I could open my game engine out to people via a no-code interface but quickly gave up on that idea, so I have a heapload of respect for your ambition and talent and I’m very interested to watch this project develop.
Yes, it is web based. There are sample games on the ‘Map’ page that are already playable. Just click a ‘world’ and the games will load on a popup screen if games exist on that user’s world. I still can’t post links for some reason (maybe because my account is so new?), but the URL is www dot ifspace dot net
Thank you for your feedback! It is greatly appreciated. Can you post a link to where I can play your tutorial game? I’d like to make that my official goal to meet (as well as an instructional video) before I reach out again. I’ll keep this post bookmarked so I know how to find you when it is ready.
Although I should probably say that I don’t consider my game to be anything like an authoritative baseline for a ‘minimum’ text adventure! There are far more experienced people than me on here that can help with that. I only mentioned it because it is where I personally would start when evaluating a new platform (I probably wouldn’t, for example, create a new game as a test - just use an existing game I’ve written to see how it compares). The game is also purely text-based and uses only a two-word VERB-NOUN parser, so is much simpler than a lot of other games.
Just a heads up that I created a new post for having created a video tutorial. It is not the best tutorial but I think it gets the main ideas out there for how the software works. I hope it helps a bit, but also I’m open to more critiques.
Hi there, just a heads up that I fixed these things (plus a few more basic changes) and also created a video tutorial. I made a new post for this, but basically you can find it all on ifSpace. I appreciate your feedback, and I hope that more people will reach out with improvements.