Introducing NovelCrafted - a choice-based IF platform

Technical Development Development Systems
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Hi everyone,

I’d like to share the launch of NovelCrafted - a choice-based IF platform!

Whether you just like reading IF, or if you prefer writing and storytelling, I’m hoping fans of IF will give NovelCrafted a try.

https://novelcrafted.com

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From the reader’s perspective, this platform is primarily a story-driven experience, much like reading an ebook online. There are several key mechanisms that make this an interactive experience:

  • Choices: Readers can be presented with choices - for example: which actions should the protagonist take? What should the protagonist say in this situation? How should they act? What should they do?
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  • Story Branching & Optional Content: Choices can branch into different story paths. This allows for different story endings, optional subplots, and other relationship story arcs - building lore and enriching the storytelling.
  • Cumulative Effect: Depending on the cumulative effect of reader’s choices, the writer of the story may choose to show alternate content on any part of the story they want.
  • Choice Lock-In: Readers should have some skin in the game. Once you make a choice, it is permanent - for that playthrough - and you must live with the consequences of your choices.
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  • Navigation: Readers can navigate back and forth freely, just like a reading physical book. NovelCrafted will ensure that readers always stay within their exact story branch path and always presents the correct content or alternate content they are supposed to see.

There are also several mechanisms I borrowed from video games:

  • Decision timers: There are some choices where you have to decide quickly. There will be a timer countdown. If time runs out and you don’t make a choice, a choice will be made for you; sometimes, not making a choice IS a choice (borrowed from “Heavy Rain”).
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  • Locked choices: Depending on the choices you made throughout the game, certain future choices could be locked, limiting future paths. In these cases, the reader will know that the choice exists, but the choice will not be selectable for that playthrough (borrowed from “Detroit: Become Human”).
  • Consequences Warning: Some choices can be so critical that the author may display a warning next to the choice selection menu. This warns reader that they are making a CRITICAL choice (borrowed from “Life is Strange”).
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  • Achievements: Readers have the opportunity to earn achievements. Achievements can be based on reaching a certain point in a certain story branch, or they can be based on the “cumulative effect” of your choices. How these are awarded are configured by the writer (borrowed from “Steam”).
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From the writer’s perspective, NovelCrafted is a full-fledged authoring tool that gives writers the ability to write stories with all of the features and gameplay mechanics mentioned above. I have several Youtube videos (average 3 minutes each) explaining how things work. Would anyone be interested in trying it out?

First story launch!

The first NovelCrafted IF story “The Anonymous Texter”, written by Ellie Burnard, was released earlier this month. This is a Young Adult (YA) fictional choice-based interactive story.

Would you be willing to give it a try? It’s free - you just need to register an account; I only ask for a name and an email address.

Thank you

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Hello and welcome to the site! We get a lot of people advertising new systems here, but you’ve avoided a lot of the common pitfalls, which is great—you’re showing off the features it offers that other systems don’t (the ability to flip back and forth through the pages without changing the choices used), and you already have a first story for people to try out.

However, people here (and in general) tend to be less willing to look at a game if it requires the up-front investment of making an account on an unknown platform. Is there a way you could let people try the sample story on a guest account, or is the account system necessary for how you track the choices made?

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Hi Daniel, thank you for your response!

I totally understand about the hesitation to register on a new, unknown system. I feel the same way…

You’re exactly right - having an account is the way that NovelCrafted tracks your specific playthrough progress and player achievements.

Are there other ways I could establish trust within the community?

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The key is getting people interested enough to sign up. Would there be a way to allow guest playthroughs of one specific story, with achievements disabled, by storing that information in the player’s browser instead? I imagine this might be a lot of work for a minor feature, but the biggest thing that motivates people to make an account is playing a cool game and saying “I want more of that”. (This is why Choice of Games has free demos of a lot of their games.)

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Congratulations on developing your IF platform! I wish you the best of luck.

Am I right in understanding that your authoring system is not yet publicly available, even to users who log in? Are the YouTube videos available publicly, even? I searched YouTube for "novelcrafted" (in quotes) but nothing turned up.

With that aside, here’s my review of “The Anonymous Texter.”

First, I note that the site lists an estimated play time for this game of “11 hours.” That seems wildly wrong. A typical playthrough seems to run approximately 30,000 words; you’ll make around 16 choices in the course of the game. It would surprise me if it took a person even five hours to finish this game. I think most people would be done in two hours, maybe three.

In my opinion, mystery stories (even more than other stories) need to be surprising, but inevitable in hindsight. Ideally, I won’t be able to guess the mystery’s outcome, but I will slap my forehead at the end and think, “Aha! I should have been able to predict this.”

The actual identity of the Anonymous Texter seems to be determined by who I chose to hang out with earlier in the story. As a result, there’s no real truth of the matter as to who the texter is. The clues don’t point toward one particular person, because they can’t, because the Anonymous Texter could be someone else, depending on who you socialize with. As a result, I could never say, “oh, of course, it had to be that person.” And, without that, as a mystery story, it doesn’t really work.

It also didn’t work for me because I don’t get to make a lot of dialogue choices for myself. The game only lets me choose who to hang out with, and then each scene unfolds non-interactively from there. I don’t (just) want to decide who I hang out with; I want to decide what to do and what to say with the people I’m hanging out with. Choosing who to hang out with sets a scene; choosing what happens in each scene is what defines who I am in the game.

Max Gladstone has a really good article about this that I recommend to a lot of choice-based IF authors. https://terribleminds.com/ramble/2014/01/07/interactive-fiction-and-how-i-learned-to-stop-grumbling-and-for-gods-sake-outline-once-in-a-while-by-max-gladstone/

I’m curious to hear your thought process about the characters. Why these characters? Why this story?

I note that there are only a few choices labeled “Your decision will have consequences.” It seems like other choices also have consequences, though…? So maybe you just mean “You won’t be able to just click the back button to undo this decision.” That doesn’t feel very meaningful to me, especially when I can just restart the game and replay a dozen-ish choices to get back to where I was.

Similarly, there are some timed choices in the game, but there doesn’t seem to be any impact/cost of running down the timer. Can’t decide whether to take the notebook, the piece of paper, or the sketchpad? Wait a few seconds and you’ll automatically take the sketchpad. Why bother timing me at that point? In timed choices, waiting out the clock should be like picking a “Do nothing” option.

It also feels strange to offer a timed choice at the bottom of a page with hundreds of words of text. I might not even realize I’m facing a timed choice until the timer is up, or, if I read fast, I might have an absurd amount of time to make that choice. I think timed choices need to exist on their own page, with a line of text at most setting up the choice.

As for your system itself, as Draconis points out, we have been getting a lot of submissions of new systems lately.

I have a standard piece of advice that I share with developers of new IF authoring systems.

Most people choose an IF platform by playing a great game and saying, “I really like this game, and I would like to make another game just like it. How did the author(s) make it?”

So, when IF platforms successfully take off, they require an admirable story (not just a technology demo) to attract new authors. Historically, the first “admirable” story for each now-successful IF platform was typically either written by the platform authors themselves, or directly funded by them. (Twine’s first admirable story by Anna Anthropy is the only exception I’m aware of.) Admirers don’t seem to directly care about any of the details of the system, except that if it’s too hard for them to learn the system and finish a game, that’s a major factor in achieving true popularity.

Right now, “The Anonymous Texter” feels like a tech demo. It doesn’t feel like an admirable story in its own right. I think you’ll need to publish something great to launch your platform effectively.

Writing the first great game yourself is also important because there are already competitive choice-based IF platforms out there, including Twine, Ink, Adventuron, and our platform, ChoiceScript.

Your platform is also in competition with authors who just want to write their own platform, like you did. Developing a work of choice-based IF is often a novice programmer’s second program, literally right after “hello world.” It’s one of the recommended projects in JavaScript for Kids for Dummies. (Chapter 16: Choose Your Own Adventure)

Having said that, I think you’re already off to a great start relative to other platforms, because you have an actual working story written by an actual writer. (Most of the other platforms have a really short 15-minute tech demo.) I think “The Anonymous Texter” isn’t great yet, but it’s way better than the pure tech demos most of the other recent platforms have exhibited.

All in all, I believe you can build the community you want to build if you’re willing to put in the work/money required to write a great game.

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Hello. This looks a really interesting system, and it’s good you have a worthwhile starting story.

Presentation is good. No problems.

I felt, for me at least, there were not enough choices in the demo story. On many pages I am scrolling down before there is a choice, making the text-to-choice ratio somewhat high. But that’s mostly my personal feeling about the ratio; i get bored if IF is not sufficiently “interactive”. That being said, adding pointless fake choices isn’t the answer either.

I am interested to learn more about the authoring system. Everyone else (ie those making similar systems) appears to be obsessed with building an online scene graph drawing and editing system. I am sceptical over this approach because, that alone, is a huge challenge. And mostly;

If you can build a working and polished online visual programming system, then you’d be better off establishing a business around that and not specifically IF. It’s what i call a “moonshot to sell toothpaste”.

Anyway, I’m very interested in your own approach. Best of luck, looks very promising.

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@jwu interesting platform . I registered and check it out . I think the highest issue you are going to have is getting ppl to sign up for the site .

I do think you did good actually showcasing the features of the platform something the others making this type of platform did not do at all . One thing I will say is the game you made barely feels interactive at all . The game showcasing your product shouldn’t be sone throw away a game ideally it be one of the best ones on the platform to start. I think this where all these platforms fail they have nice sites but nobody ever seems to put the effort into making a game that fully utilizes and showcases the features of the product .

i know the system is choice based but you should really look into text games with actual game mechanics if you want it to look and feel more game like .

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This is a great suggestion. I have this on my TODO list as top priority and have already gotten started.

I will allow authors to decide how much of their story to make available to try for free - and without having to log in - on a story-by-story basis.

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Hi Dan, thank you for the thoughtful comments and review of the story. It means a lot to me.

I have taken your advice to heart, and I will apply your suggestions to the next Story offering for NovelCrafted.

To answer your question about the authoring system: the authoring system is 100% finished - The Anonymous Texter was authored on it. The Youtube videos are published as well.

Writing privileges need to be approved manually (for now).

The Youtube videos are currently unlisted, but viewable if you have the direct link to it. Here is one of them: https://youtu.be/5vvNrBtPGqg?si=Qiv8VRJ_wDyx_VA2

Thank you again for your comments!

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Hi @jkj_yuio , thanks for your comments and suggestions about the playability of the first story. I’ll try to incorporate your feedback into all future Stories (that I have control over).

Initially, I built NovelCrafted as a way for me to write IF for fun and profit (hopefully).

I did not research how other people built their IF authoring systems. I basically just created a tool that I myself would want to use and would enjoy using. After a while, I thought: why not open it up to other writers? And that’s why I posted here. I have 6 Youtube videos explaining how all of the authoring works.

For example, here’s one of them: https://youtu.be/5vvNrBtPGqg?si=X1vsgO9kH5ydjrcb

Would you be interested in trying the authoring system?

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Hi @Qianyixia , thank you for signing up and giving NovelCrafted a try! I have been taking notes from everyone’s suggestions here so far. I will try my best to incorporate the feedback into future revisions of the platform itself as well as future stories that I have control over.

Do you have a favorite IF text game? Would you mind sharing your favorite text game of all time?

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I’ve watched the video. The graph-of-nodes approach is not for me, but it is very popular with Twine.

IMO, the graph-of-nodes encourages works of IF to remain tiny, because node diagrams can only really represent a few dozen things before they become as complicated as the thing you were trying to understand in the first place.

And when analyzing messy node diagrams, it’s not just the nodes we’re trying to visualize, but the lines connecting the nodes (the “edges”). We can only visualize a few dozen of those, and that typically means we can visualize only a handful of nodes at a time.

IMO, this is why there are so many “short and sweet” Twine games. Node diagrams make it easy to make little games, but get in your way when you try to make larger works.

As a result, I suspect that the games you develop in NovelCrafted will tend to be shaped like Twine games, which will make it harder for NovelCrafted to differentiate itself from Twine.

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@jwu disco elysium is one of my favorite of all time but the vast majority of text based games don’t have the writing of disco elysium.

Suzerain and the visual novels slay the princess and the life and suffering of sir brante are my other favorites .

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(Quick little forum etiquette thing—I know you’re new here! Usually, it’s better to send one long response post, if that’s what you’re doing, then individually replying to each person in a separate post. You can quote posts by highlighting them and getting the Quote/Copy Quote/Share pop-ups. This lets you respond to them like this:

Hello!

And by clicking the box, you can see the entire post or even jump to where that post is in the thread.

Using this quoting mechanics also automatically mentions them. So does directly replying to a post, so you don’t need to both reply and ping someone.)

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if the story player is anything like the storefront pages, can I make the suggestion of adding bigger margins? Long lines of text are difficult to read!

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Thanks for sharing the authoring video. If there are more that you are willing to share, please do.

There is nothing wrong with your authoring system, and it’s very similar to the others I’ve seen. The problems are going to come later as it gets more complicated;

Firstly, at some point, you are going to need conditionals. Earlier, I was looking at the EtherGround system (in another thread), and it is already quite complicated. In fact, i found the visual development quite confusing. Now, of course, that might not necessarily be the case in your version. But it will start to get complicated.

Secondly, Dan’s point about visual complexity is relevant. Every single visual development I’ve seen so far looks great for a few nodes and a terrible mess thereafter.

For example, i get blank responses when i ask; how do i cut and paste nodes, rearrange links, loop things back, or how to insert a node or delete one within the exiting connectivity?

Pretty soon, you’ll be writing a full-up visual diagramming tool!

Having said that, I’m not suggesting you abandon your visual approach. It’s great for beginners, attracting users, and does work for short stories.

I am not a writer, and it would be interesting to learn from writers here whether, for commercial projects, they would prefer a visual development system or an offline text-based one. Perhaps something similar to Ink or Twine in syntax?

Because, if so, you could consider keeping the visual builder simple while also supporting a “Pro NovelCrafted” language?

Finally, yes please, I would be interested to try out the authoring system and give feedback.

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I feel like echoing a few of the things others have said. It’s great that you’ve got your platform up and running with a clear idea of features, and an existing story already in place — and without pushing AI as a core feature, which is frankly a breath of fresh air. Having said that, I tried a bit of the example story and I just couldn’t concentrate on it, way way too much text to choice ratio, and reams of back and forth one-line speech.

My big question, though, is to ask why you are being so reticent in promoting the authoring features you came here to advertise. You’ve got a fully featured editor, but we can’t try it without asking (and there’s nothing on the site to indicate that asking is an option). You’ve got explanatory videos, but there’s no way to find them other than from the odd link you’ve posted here.

What really excites most people here is not playing a new system, but actually using it, and right now you are making that oddly hard to do.

My advice would be to open up the authoring system to everyone. Let us try it out, publish demo games, see the videos from inside the platform, etc. If you are worried that it’s not quite ready for full release, badge it as a beta. If you are worried about random people’s games messing up what’s on offer to readers, vet them first — though you are almost certainly relying on exactly that model for future growth, so let it happen.

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@dfabulich - thank you for the kind words. I will try my best to see what I can do to differentiate from Twine.

@Qianyixia - I was able to find those titles on Steam. I haven’t played any of those before, but I have played a few visual novels. The last one I played was Doki Doki Literature Club, a while ago. It was amazing. I hope someday to have the equivalent of that level of fun in a text-based format on NovelCrafted. Thanks for sharing.

@Hidnook I will start replying as you have suggested.

Yes, I can definitely increase the margins on the player. Currently, the story player caps the width of the display text at 64 characters per line (for monospaced fonts). My understanding is that ideally we want 60-70 characters per line. Do you prefer less than 60 for online reading? I may be able to make that an option in user’s profile settings in the future.

(The player uses a proportional font, so the number of actual characters per line can vary.)

@Hituro That’s a great question. I guess I wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested in trying the authoring interface, so I came here initially only planning to ask if anyone would be interested in trying the first book as a reader.

I will change it so that registering for an account will give authoring privileges automatically, and I will auto-grant all registered users authoring rights as well.

I’m currently working on allowing non-logged in users to play through stories. Hoping to have that done by the end of the week. Once that is done, I’ll make the change to the authoring rights.

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On line length;

People have told me 14 words. Don’t know if that’s correct. I discovered you can get away with about 80 chars. Maybe that’s a bit of an upper limit, but it seems ok.

Then I realised that’s the size of old screens, and wondered if that was why.

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… or maybe old screens were made that size because that’s what’s comfortable to read?