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.