Interactive novels?

I just ran into this today: Calico by Elliot Herriman

Calico is an interactive fiction engine for the web, built for stories written in Inkle’s ink.

No idea how it holds up, but it seems to be aimed at covering those holes.

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We have a good community of Twine users on this forum, but the exchanges tend to be technical support more than writing craft. Writing discussion is more than welcome here, so please feel free to start discussion if you’d like, and you might be surprised who might pitch in.

I’ve written several long-ish choice narratives in AXMA which is close enough to Twine to discuss story structure. I may be totally wrong about this, but bare Twine seems to attract authors writing shorter narratives with lots of cool text manipulation. If it’s a longer piece, I suspect many people use Twine but then dress it up via styling so it doesn’t scream “Twine”.

The other thing involved - for me personally, I don’t like to talk about story and plot that I’m working on publicly. Not that I’m afraid of people taking ideas, it’s just that due to the nature of what I write, I like to spring the piece out unspoiled to the general public. I do talk ideas and brainstorming with certain trusted individuals privately - I am lucky to know some really good alpha-testers.

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That seems promising. It doesn’t seem to let you save to slots manually (only auto save), and from what I can tell you can’t restart your game without manually deleting localstorage, but it looks good otherwise. It seems to have just been uploaded too, so the timing is pretty funny.

Hi! I’m the gal that made that engine! itch.io let me know I’d been getting traffic from this website, so I thought I’d swing by.

Calico’s currently able to save data in one of three ways-- via cookies, via session storage, or via local storage. The default is session storage, which only applies to the current tab and is discarded if you close that tab, but you can specify which format you want to use. There are also methods for manually saving, loading, and deleting data, but I honestly haven’t had the time to implement an example of those yet. If you’re even semi comfortable with Javascript, thought, it wouldn’t be a hard thing to implement, and I’d be more than happy to answer any questions any of you have if you message me on Twitter.

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Hi! Thanks for hopping in. :)

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I’ve added Calico to the IF Resource Link post under Ink.

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Twine definitely has a developer commuinity - according to my brother (who’s in the process of writing what is intended to become a commercial Twine IF), there’s a large Twine community at its official Discord.

Ren’Py has a community of choice-based IF at its Lemmasoft forum and Discord channels, and as a general rule, other choice-based IF also have places where discussion goes on. As a general rule, though, good writing in one choice-based IF option is good writing in any choice-based IF option; as long as you are careful not to look like you are advertising a different engine, you can mix-and-match to get your writing community.

I’d pick the platform that best suits your story and how you approach IF development for actually writing your story, regardless of your source(s) of advice - and vice versa. If COG gives you the best writing advice for your Twine novel, and Twine is the best platform for you to write your IF, by all means visit COG for writing help and write the IF in Twine. (It’s polite to credit people who help you if you’re in a position to do that and they’re OK with it).

And yes, intfiction.org is a friendly place with people who will help you if you get stuck.

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One of the things of which you should be aware if you choose to create a longform Twine project is that the Electron app lags a lot once you reach a certain size. It’s so annoying that many people choose to give up and use a command-line compiler like Tweego, although this is kind of suboptimal, because a major part of the appeal of Twine is precisely its grid display, so that you can make sense of how your story is mapped.

If you’re stubborn like me, then it’s definitely possible to trudge through the lag and make it work. It’s more annoying than it is preventative, but I work on a pretty nice laptop, so your mileage may vary: if you have a cheap laptop, you might find that it does become impossible; if you have a good desktop, then maybe you will only get a small amount of lag.

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A perhaps interesting point about the Twine editor lagging: I’m currently working on a really big project (right now at almost 1600 passages, close to 340 000 words). I used the offline editor, same as for my previous games, and it started lagging badly at around 1300 passages. But when (out of curiosity/desperation) I switched to the online editor, it worked just fine, and still does.

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The online editor performs only marginally better for me, and it has several downsides, like it’s harder to backup to Google Drive, and there’s a size limit (my current file is at 33% of that limit, so there’s a lot of room, but still), so I choose to just rough it out in the client. I’m glad to hear it works for you though, and that’s definitely a great suggestion for others in such a situation.

Out of curiosity, how many links do you have in your file? I think drawing the link arrows is the primary contributor to the lag issue.

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I have 2645 links right now (and use around 70% of the space available, but luckily I’m mostly done adding content). I also prefer the offline editor, but in this case it became unusable. Actually, I wasn’t expecting the online version to work so much better, an I don’t know why it does, but I won’t complain :wink:

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Regarding switching from a Twine application based project to a TWEE Notation based one, and still having access to a Passage Grid / Story Map.

A Twine community member named cyrusfirheir, with the help of a couple of other members, has written an extension named Twee 3 Language Tools for the Visual Studio Code text editor. This extension includes a (wip) story-map view (contributed by Goctionni) that opens in the VSC browser.

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I had thought about mentioning Visual Novels. I just got sucked into the time-sink that is Danganronpa and it’s convincing me to want to try a VN. Commercial VNs are routinely very wordy and tend to offer fewer choices and less player agency, but often are built with multiple routes and fans routinely play multiple times to see all the content which is often novella or novel length (or possibly more via multiple plot tracks). Most VN engines have a “skip read content” mode built in to facilitate this and skipping seen text and dialogue is an expected player behavior.

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I just wanted to think everyone who posted here, this discussion has been encouraging for me. Apologies for vanishing from my own thread, I was reading an the replies as the Gmail notifications popped up, but just sort of emotionally drained from an ongoing family situation and didn’t feel up to replying.

I’ve heard of the Twine lag, but at around 80k words and a little over a hundred passages have not experienced it, and was hoping it was more based on the number of links. Seeing actual numbers from others is helpful and I hope I won’t run into this issue, but it’s something I’ll be mindful of now and try to have a plan for if I end up needing to use something else.

It does seem there’s an abundance of authoring options out there with something for everyone, so the more important thing seems to be finding the right community of readers.

I’ve thought about trying my hand at a visual novel, but honestly the art assets are beyond me and I don’t have the budget to commission what would be required.

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Why not use clip arts? In any case, you can use what’s called developer’s art. Usually, this means colored rectangles. People can be represented by ellipses with names attached. Then, when you finished the game, maybe some artist will do it for you for cheap for exposure and some piece of the action.

Not all VNs have good art. The commercial ones do because that’s half the reason they sell. But the indie games tend to have pretty poor art. I’ve even played some that didn’t have a single character portrait. A common thing to do is to take photos of real world places and run them through a filter.

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (aka Higurashi: When They Cry) is a famous indie VN that became a famous anime. It’s now had an original 48 episode series, a manga series, a remake series that is currently airing, and a bunch of spinoff anime series, not to mention being released on PS2, PS3, PS4, Vita, and Switch.

I mention all that, because this is what it looked like when it released.

It used background photos of a real village in Japan and the characters had balloon hands bigger than their heads. But the writing was so good that nobody cared. It’s since then gone through a few upgrades to being commercial quality (mostly the versions on consoles), but the version you buy on Steam still has the original assets.

Switch version for comparison.

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My artistic abilities are limited to low res pixel art, and even that takes me a long time. Would a VN with poor art be better than a textual game with no art? Would it be worth dragging out development time a few more months?

I’ve seen some good looking 3D renders, but I think that working with Daz3D or Poser would take me even longer tbh

Right, because if there’s one thing everyone knows about artists, it’s that they just looove working for ‘exposure’. :stuck_out_tongue:

There’s a pretty good selection of sci fi and fantasy background and character art you can get for signing up a month at one of those stock photo places (which all seen to have extensive collections of original art now). As well as real photos as Tayruh mentioned.

This still would make it difficult to do a commercial visual novel, but you could get a following for other reasons, and art can always be upgraded and replaced. And for my purposes writing something more prose heavy, atmospheric background art was more along the lines of what I’ve needed.

Visual novels always seem very dialog focused to me too, like there doesn’t seem to be much that’s done in them that doesn’t involve talking to other characters. So as far as writing goes it doesn’t really fit my style.

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It’s hard to say, really. It all depends on how you use it. It’s kind of like the argument of books vs movies. Both have their strengths and weaknesses.

I’ll at least say in Higurashi, certain scenes like Rena flipping the F out on you out of nowhere would have had less impact without accompanying art.

Have you read many VNs? There’s generally more time spent in your character’s head with monologue than spent talking with characters (they’re usually told in first person). At least with the ones with a strong story. Promotional art usually only shows shots with characters because it helps advertise the art, and games where the goal is mostly just to hook up with a girl has mostly dialogue, but those VNs usually suck and have really poor stories.

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