Hello everyone,
This is my first post here.
My name is Yohan Dupuy,I’m a French author and developer, and for the past few years I’ve been building a psychological horror interactive novel called Maximilien.
It’s set in Boston in 1926. You play Maximilien Cornwell, a psychology student pulled into a series of unsolved murders, whose grip on the investigation (and on his own perception) comes apart over four days.
It runs to roughly 500 passages and 1,755 narrative states resolving into eight endings, built in Twine/SugarCube.
The horror isn’t gore; it’s dissociation, guilt, and the slow suspicion that something is wrong with you specifically.
I’m planning to enter it in IFComp 2026, with a Steam release to follow: Maximilien — A Psychological Horror Interactive Novel on Steam
The mechanic I most want to talk about here is the sanity system, and I want to be precise about it, because it’s easy to misread.
As sanity decays, the game does not rewrite the prose underneath you. The words stay the words. What changes is how the text is rendered on screen in real time: typographic decay, distortion, visual artifacts creeping into the page itself, so that unreliability is something you watch happening to the text rather than something the narrator simply announces. Keeping the underlying writing intact while deforming its presentation turned out to be a delicate line between “unsettling” and “unreadable.”
One thing that belongs on this forum in particular: Maximilien was written in French first, and the English version is a genuine literary adaptation by my translator, Lucia Desogus, not a literal pass.
The prose is meant to be read, somewhere in the lineage of Poe, Lovecraft and the French roman noir, and I treat the English as its own crafted text rather than a subtitle. (An original score and illustrations round out a small but real team.)
So, my open question to you: how have you handled “sanity,” unreliability, or a deteriorating narrator at the level of the rendered text: typography, CSS-driven distortion, glitch effects, rather than by swapping passages?
And which existing IF do you think does perceptual unreliability best without sacrificing readability or accessibility?
I’d genuinely welcome pointers, war stories, and disagreements.
Thanks for reading, and happy to get into the design of any of this.
Yohan
Welcome!
I see that this is in the “wishlist-only” mode on Steam.
Be aware that one of the rules of IFComp is that the version submitted to IFComp needs to be free to play, and that version will continue to remain available for free after the Comp, as are all IFComp submissions.
I don’t believe you can simultaneously release commercially on Steam “in October” while the Comp is still happening, though I suppose you could put it on Steam for a price after the Comp, but if it’s the same version available from the Comp archive for free you probably won’t get a lot of paying customers. If you mean to release on Steam for free also during the comp (Can Steam games be free?) that’s probably also okay - many Comp authors will co-release on itch.io for free during the Comp to improve visibility.
That said, there was a Comp release Scarlet Sails several years back which was then expanded by something like 50k words and that plussed-version secured a commercial release with Choice of Games.
[!tip] Rules for authors, #2
All entries must cost nothing for judges to play. Entries may not request payment in order to play through the game, require the player to view paid advertising, or make similar commercial demands of the player.You retain the copyright to any games you enter, and may do whatever you wish with your work after the competition ends. That said, by entering IFComp, you grant the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFComp’s organizing body) the non-exclusive right to distribute, without limit, all material you submit to the competition.
https://ifcomp.org/rules/
Private beta-testing is fine, but needs to be private. Be really careful about linking to your actual playable game and discussing it publicly - on this forum especially, though Private Messaging with your testers is fine.
I’ve moved this to the Playing > Beta Testing Requests and Discussion
If you want to discuss concepts of writing about sanity and unreliable narrators in general without spoiling your game, I would suggest asking questions in Authoring > Story Research and Design
Thank you! this is a generous and careful welcome, and exactly the kind of grounding I was hoping for.
Let me put your mind at ease on the main thing: I actually wrote to the organizers before posting here, precisely because I wanted to be sure I had the eligibility right, and they were kind enough to confirm it.
The version I’m entering will make its public debut in the Comp and will be free for judges, full stop.
There’s no sale running alongside the competition: nothing playable and nothing for purchase during judging, and the release itself comes afterwards, once the Comp has wrapped.
On the archive, I understand and accept that the entered version stays free there, permanently, and I’m genuinely at peace with that.
The way I think about it, the entry is its own self-contained, shorter piece, and anything fuller comes later and separately, when it’s actually ready, very much in the spirit of doing a full release independent of the competition.
I’d rather the entry stand on its own as a story than lean on anything else.
On the practical side: understood on keeping testing private, and I’ll be careful not to post anything actually playable here.
Thank you for moving the thread, and for the pointer to Story Research & Design, that’s exactly where I’ll take any questions about writing sanity and unreliable narration without spoiling the work.
Thanks again for taking the time; it’s a warm first impression of the community.