Well I am wannabe cat. I’m closing in on thirty. Have putzed around and made some games in twine before. I’ve basically been on my own personal sabbitical for over a year on game development. And now I’m coming back with a renewed interest in learning, playing, and developing interactive fiction again because thats a space I really want to play in.
I’ve mostly made very small, a few thousand word interactive fiction and I think some of the stuff I made is pretty good and even helped contributed to a very good game. I am working on IF and thinking of doing the mini twine jam thats going on over at itch io so that will be swell.
Also be aware that linking to or sharing your unpublished games publicly on this forum or other social media can disqualify them from some competitions as they may no longer be considered “unpublished works”. If you are still testing your game with an eye on IFComp, you’ll want to share with your testers privately - either by private message here or personal email.
hello. i found this community because i was a browsing a cohost page from a game dev that i enjoy who posted a game they entered in a competition. on the itch page was a link to here. i don’t know a ton about if but i did grow up reading a lot of books and playing games that i came to love because of the worlds i could fall into. i’m in my 30s and hail from the east coast of the u.s.
i’m looking forward to learning and growing with everyone here. i’ve spent the past few hours lurking and this place seems pleasant compared to others that i’ve tried in the past.
i think my goal is to learn what i can about telling stories in twine especially. despite being aspiring for years, i don’t have any projects on my belt to show off. i’d love to be able to actually have something cohesive by this time next year. i am disabled, so it’s hard for me to keep a decent sleep schedule, however, i’m willing to push myself to become a better writer that people would actually enjoy reading.
my main love of games started with jrpgs ( in case it wasn’t obvious from my username ) and visual novels. i’m not much of an artist ( though i’ve been thinking of teaching myself how to make sprites and pixel art someday ) but i think i’d be totally fine at creating visuals through words instead.
it’s been awhile since i’ve posted on forum. i almost didn’t make this post at all, but i’m ready to dive in and learn what i can and hopefully make some friends too!
thanks for creating this space!
nice to meet everyone.
I have been here for fourteen (!) years, and I have to say this is not just one of the best virtual spaces for discussing IF but also one of the best virtual spaces on the Internet period. The mods are kind and helpful. People who have published more and higher rated games than I have talk to me like I am their peer. The vast majority of the people here want to do right by each and make our community more welcome to newcomers and the new ideas you might bring with you. If your experience here is at least half as good as mine has been, you are going to love it.
thanks for the warm welcome everyone, i appreciate it. today has been spent with me wrangling with a sleep schedule that does not seem to want to be tamed. i started a story for someone else but have been on break for two days since starting. perhaps today i will make some progress.
this is great to hear and makes me excited to check out some if stories for myself! thank you for letting me know. i hope it won’t be too long before i can share a story or two, thank you.
thank you! i am doing my best to take everything in. i remember trying out twine about a year or two ago and just petering out due to not really knowing what i was going. i started a game prior called ’ open sorcery ’ that i liked a lot and that was one of things that sparked my interest in if at first!
i have been an aspiring game dev for some time but don’t really know how to handle programming or the art side of things. using something like twine or another program makes it so even someone like me can make a game and i’m excited to see what will happen later.
thank you for introducing yourself! i’ve been on forums in the past but, ultimately, winded up leaving in frustration due to the way everyone seemed to treat each other with suspicion. i also couldn’t seem to find my way around game dev tools which led to another kind of frustration. i miss people that i’ve met over the years, but i’m glad to have found a place where people are kind and not only in it for themselves.
your message gives me the impression that this really is the place i’ve been looking for quite a long time. fourteen years tho! that makes you a veteran. i’m glad that you have found a place to call home and can continue to do so. i wasted my youth on anime and other video games forums. older, but not necessarily wiser by the experience ( maybe in some ways but not others haha ).
i am going to spend some more time checking out the rest of the forums while also seeing what guides are available so i can start learning what i can as soon as possible. i hope this is the beginning of me spending a long time here!
Hi everyone. New to the site. I’ve been dabbling in IF for a while now having tried many - COG Script, Twine, Adrift and now Inform 7 and Gamebook Author out of the UK.
I’ve semi-retired to the Caribbean and am active in Itch.io as Jgesq.
I’ve also been working on visual novel formatting using TyranoBuilder.
Looking forward to connecting and contributing.
Hi everyone.
I’m Anita. I work in the interactive field as a 3D real-time artist, however, I’m really interested in narrative design and stories. I’m currently working on non-linear visual novels.
I’ve dabbled in Ink, Ren’py, Twine, and Naninovel, but have also enjoyed reading plenty of games via Choice Of Games and Choicescript.
Really looking forward to getting to know the community here.
Hello, I posted on forum already but did not introduce myself yet.
My name is Robert, and I have been tinkering with the text-adventures (interactive fiction) since 90s. My first own home computer was Commodore 64. There was a paper magazine which often published code of simple text-adventure games written in BASIC. Although very young, I was fascinated by the possibilities allowed by programming languages. So, of course the “IF THEN ELSE” statement was my favourite, but I liked the locations, items and compass directions.
Later, my father bought us Amiga CDTV multimedia computer and I found the rich contents of compact disks. I found the ADL and AdvSys authoring systems, apart from ADMS (Amiga Dungeon Mastering System) and Alan. I met also choose-an-option adventure systems like Haktar and EAC.
ADL and AdvSys are systems written in C language (K&R standard) providing powerful LISP-like languages for easy text-adventure creation.
AdvSys is fully object-oriented with classes, methods etc.
Currently I am a computer-science student and hopefully will get my master degree this year.
I managed to compile ADL and AdvSys for Windows 11 PC. Although these systems came originally for Amiga, MS-DOS and some more.
I have written a few adventures in past few years, putting them in ParserComp and Literacy Jam. My current adventures are short, however they provide fun as I learned from feedback, for which I am very thankful. I am sure I will write some bigger adventure.
I welcome a die-hardest Amiga user ! (nothing against the Atari ST, must be very clear !)
I must point to you that with Inform 10, 7, 6 TADS 2, Alan 2 and Hugo you have an excellent choice of more or less modern IF language (cross) compilers for Amiga, so you’re welcome to code/port IF for Amiga
ADL and AdvSys have been released by their authors for a variety of platforms: Amiga, MS-DOS, Unix and AdvSys also for Apple computers.
I am Amiga fan and user but I created Windows compilation to allow ADL and AdvSys games be playable also on modern PCs. AdvSys is playable with Gargoyle interpreter as well.
ADL and AdvSys are my choice for parser-based systems. I can play them on Amiga OS, and PC. I understand that Inform is a modern, widely used authoring system and it’s worth a look. I had no occasion to learn this language.
Authoring games in Inform would require to learn and practice these new languages. Thus the ADL/AdvSys is better option for me at the moment.
Hi hi! Naarel here! I come from the dark and mysterious lands (very rural Poland), and ever since I was a little kid, I was really into the whole storytelling and writing thing. My journey with interactive fiction (and writing in English in general, as it’s not my first language) began in 2016, when I experimented with Quest, from which I moved to Squiffy. Then I took a big break, began experimenting with Ren’py and started my “career” as a VN dev in 2022. Lately, I decided to come back to a more “pure text” form and started having fun with Twine, and therefore, I’m back here in IF space where all of this began. I like to write things that are emotional and/or queer and I have 3 terabytes of Various Lore in my head at all times. I also help people out with playtesting their games and such.
Outside of IF/VN stuff: I write poetry, try to learn how to draw and make music, attempt calligraphy, do some old school text roleplay through e-mail and enjoy going on walks. Hope that we can all get along! (though so far, people from this community that I talked to were nothing but kind towards me, so I don’t worry about it too much.)
Welcome to the board! I found Inklewriter interesting for making super-quick story-board choice trees, which I suppose would be a fast way to prototype a Twine game. Inklewriter is a web-app implementation of a more robust (presumably) downloadable authoring tool (Inky), which uses a markup language called Ink. Inky has download links for Mac, Windows, and Linux, but I haven’t even tried it, I’ve only used Inklewriter the web-based one, and only for short storyboard stuff, not a full length IF. So, YMMV. I found it super simple to try out, however, and best is the price (free).
