This is definitely an IF creator platform, as well as a business. They have their own forums similar to this one, as well as their own preferences, etc. CoG has a very specific format that their audience expects and enjoys.
Most people do this without monetization. In IFDB, out of over 15,000 games, 97% are free to play.
IF creators aren’t looking for “success”. Success looks like scoring well in a comp, or reaching the audience that one wanted to reach. Money and fame are not of interest for most people.
Advanced IF creators should definitely have the functionality to do basic things.
100%. People spend hours, days, months, or years working on a single work.
Thank you for having the flexibility to change your perspective, instead of insisting that your way is the only way (which others have done here).
In terms of monetization and finding players, a lot of people use itch.io for this! That’s a platform that I can upload my game to and enable payments and help players to discover it through tags and so forth, while, crucially, the game continues to exist as a file that is on my hard drive (and several backups) and will continue to exist even if Itch disappears. If it’s wiped off the face of the earth tomorrow I can upload my game somewhere else in a matter of minutes, instead of having to remake the whole thing from scratch like some people have had to do with games that were on cloud platforms.
This is a really hard one to answer frankly - there’s been no surveys that I’m aware of and this is only a small corner of the Twine scene (there’s thriving communities on Tumblr and Itch.io that have hardly any overlap with this forum). I’d say the sweet spot is some complexity - very few games use JUST links, but based on vibes the vast majority can do what they set out to with basic variables and logic structures. About the only thing I can say with confidence is that the vast majority of games, including the murder mystery I mentioned earlier, either don’t dip into the JavaScript layer at all or if they do it’s very brief.
(As an aside, the thing I tend to see that trips up authors less skilled in coding is making an inventory, which either requires learning how arrays work (harder than loops and if/else) or importing a module someone else has written (also not the easiest for a newbie programmer)).
Anyway, the reason people are so gun shy about cloud-only platforms isn’t from any sense of territoriality but from having been burned before. StoryNexus was an attempt to create a platform like you’re describing and was backed by none other than the studio behind Fallen London, but it failed and many of its games are lost. Varytale was another and the only reason its seminal game (Emily Short’s Bee) isn’t lost is due to hard work from members of the community (notably Autumn Chen, who truly went above and beyond) as well as luck. Once bitten, twice shy, as they say, and we’ve been bitten far more than that.
I’m having a hard time picturing what you’re trying to do. There are already pretty easy methods for creating IF. Creating games without programming seems maybe sort of possible but not super interesting, to me at least. There are already lots of good games in IF so that’s not the explanation for your perceived lack of success of the medium. Asking participants in said lack of success seems unlikely to result in a new successful idea that will make you millions.
I appreciate all the responses. I did not realize I was touching a nerve with past posters and platforms that went under. That makes the tone more understandable. Choice of Games seems to have made a successful business out of this niche, but with a model I’m not interested in replicating. I think Hidnook hit on something important with the statements “in IFDB, out of over 15,000 games, 97% are free to play” and “IF creators aren’t looking for ‘success’”. I based some assumptions about what I thought I could accomplish on the idea that IF was a market with an opportunity to be empowered and expanded, but I think that’s not the driving factor here. It’s probably art, regardless of engagement, fame, or income. I can respect that, but it does change my perspective on the market opportunity.
Thank you everyone who responded. I learned different things from each of you, and very quickly. From my perspective, this was a very successful engagement, and I’m not sure I could have come to the same understandings quickly (or at all) by lurking alone.
Which is interesting from the point of view of someone who started with the Twine discord community, because everyone uses some JS in their games over there. I don’t think I’ve seen a single game advertised there that doesn’t use a fair degree of scripting through macros, and most of them go to custom JS somewhere, even the Harlowe ones!
But that’s another contained community, of course, and maybe one that attracts the people more keen on coding. Hard to tell.
Absolutely fascinating! I had no idea. Definitely it’s a simpler crowd out here, but still way more complicated as standard than “no code at all”.
EJ and I have definitely gotten to the point where not knowing Javascript is getting in the way of what we want to do, so I’m grateful to have the option (and glad to know where to look for advice!). But I think that’s the goal of any newbie-friendly platform, right? You want to provide an accessible set of tools up front but not limit how far an expert can go.
I find these recurring discussions on how to make IF more successful/popular/profitable somewhat tiresome. If you want to expand the audience by 1000% then almost by definition you’re going to have to create/find a new audience. But to play along… erotic Harry Potter fan fiction seems to be having a moment. And people like puzzles like wordle and crossword so I can imagine giving people a short daily text based puzzle could be popular.
Others have answered a lot of the questions and my answers won’t be much different, but I figure I might as well give my responses, for completeness’ sake.
you don’t lose your work if the cloud service goes out of business (others have pointed out that this has demonstrably been an issue in the past)
you don’t lose your work if the cloud service decides to start charging money or messing with the license or inserting ads or otherwise worsening the service ex post facto
people can hypothetically develop useful tools/extensions that operate on the project locally, up to and including a fully alternative competing editor
To use the old cliche here, by “freely” I mean free as in speech, not free as in beer. A platform that offers discoverability is nice, but I absolutely do not want to pour effort into creating something that I can’t host on my own website, or a general-purpose platform like itch.io, or hypothetically Steam (if the game progresses to that level of quality).
Plus, all the concerns about the cloud platform going out of business or borking the terms & conditions ex post facto still apply.
It’s more about being able to export, rather than import. I want to be able to e.g. develop a story using the tool, and then incorporate it into a game in an engine like Unity/Unreal/Godot. Ink is the obvious example of a tool that does this well. I’d also like to be able to incorporate existing libraries from some sort of established ecosystem (e.g. I once made a game in Ink that used the webcam to detect when the player blinks, which I was able to do by using an existing javascript library for the computer vision component).
Well, the absolute bare minimum that any viable interactive fiction tool needs is the ability to set, display, and condition on variables describing world state (e.g. front_door_is_unlocked), basic stats (health, stamina, etc) and inventory. But as a programmer I’d be frustrated if that was the limit of the scripting tools available. For example, a lot of tools lack arrays or something equivalent, which gets frustrating fast.
I guess I was thinking about two things here. The first is just that I want to be able to store individual scenes on their own (i.e. in their own file or equivalent), rather than having the entire story exist as a giant red-string-spaghetti Pepe Silvia board.
The second is basically that I want functions - for example, something that I can run at the beginning of every “room,” or a reusable skill check function, or a reusable “check if the player just ran out of health and died” function, and so on. These sorts of things might sometimes make sense to reuse between projects, but even within a single project I’d want the ability to create these sorts of functions.
In Ink, for example, I can write a small conversation like this:
The bartender eyes you suspiciously.
"You're not from around here, are you?"
* Nope, you're right. I'm just visiting.
"Where you from, then?"
** I'm from the city.
"We don't take kindly to city folk around here."
** None of your business.
"This is my bar. Everything here is my business."
* Of course I am.
"You don't talk like a local."
** And how would a local talk, exactly?
"Those who know, know."
** I'll talk however I please.
"Around here, talking however you please gets you punched in the face."
-
It doesn't seem like you'll get much useful information out of the bartender.
It would be a pain in the ass if each line and choice in this interaction had a whole “create new node; edit node text; add connected node” workflow associated with it.
EDIT: Also, to touch on the monetization thing: I think the main problem with monetizing IF currently is simply that there are not a lot of paying customers for specifically text-only IF, since most people will prefer video games that have a narrative component and graphics and more complex gameplay. The missing factor is a community of players, not the authoring system. And because the market isn’t there, everyone getting involved in the community understands that the goal is not to make money; people who enjoy the genre but do want to make money just accept the fact that they’ll also need to add a minimum level of video-gamey-ness to succeed, in the vein of e.g. Failbetter or Inkle.
Firstly, congratulations on working on your own system. I realise this is an early alpha, but I do have some suggestions.
Annoyingly (for me), when i create a new block, it doesn’t appear in the drop-down of choices until i refresh the page. This is a bug and quite annoying, even in the system’s early form.
I’d like to be able to put an image in a block.
The web page response time is a bit slow. It could be my poor internet, but I’m only seeing text at the moment.
I’d really like a way to export my work as a text file. Annoyingly, I’d find it more efficient to edit that file and re-upload it compared to clicking around for ages. That’s a personal preference that many people won’t necessarily share. I could also do offline spell-check etc.
At some point you’ll need conditionals on your choice links. Not sure how you should do this. Some people mentioned JavaScript. That’s a possibility. Or else perhaps your own scripting language. Or maybe a handy existing interpreted language.
Lastly, have a look at Kinexus. There’s a recent thread on it. It’s doing something very similar and doing it quite well.
That was kind of you. I do not expect anyone to try it after hearing all of the feedback here and the kinds of tools and capabilities everyone is used to.
I appreciate all of your feedback. All of your points seem valid.
Kinexus is very interesting, thank you for the recommendation. It does look quite good to me.
I think it’s fair to say that at this point that what I have brought forward to this community in both product and expectation is woefully inadequate, and I accept that. I come from the software school of “fail fast”, which is why I looked for “experts” on the market. I don’t know if this is worth pursuing given all of the feedback here. You already have great desktop apps and prefer independent distribution approaches. I’m not a game engine developer at the end of the day, and it doesn’t look like a cloud platform I could offer would be of much value. So once again, interacting with all of you has been very educational, and if the project isn’t worth pursuing for all of the detailed and valid reasons you each listed, then I appreciate finding that out quickly rather than investing a lot of time only to reach the same conclusion.
There’s a quote from Python the documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfH4QL4VqJ0) which seems relevant, something like “if they (the company) had known that python would be so successful they would have never released for free, but if they hadn’t released it for free it wouldn’t have been so successful.
I think this thread may be giving an overly gloomy picture. There is absolutely room for new software, including that aimed at beginners. I don’t think anyone foresaw the success of Choicescript or Twine until those things happened. I believe the disconnect is simply that you’re pitching a tool for beginners to a mostly experienced audience.
I concur with those who recommend researching existing games and tools. You’ll almost certainly need a system for variables and conditional logic. I believe inventory management and turn-based combat are also commonly desired features. Offering a robust and easily customizable implementation of those ‘out of the box’ would probably be an advantage. Allowing cosmetic changes without the need for CSS would also likely be an asset.
I believe there are a sufficient number of flaws in existing software to indicate at least some gap in the market. For Twine:
The visual depiction of passages in the IDE quickly becomes clunky when you move beyond even a very small game.
Using Twine without the IDE requires a poorly documented command line tool.
Correct formatting is tricky. Games will often include unwanted line breaks.
Authors are required to make a permanent choice of ‘story format’ when beginning a project, which is a source of considerable confusion for beginners and may discourage them from getting started at all.
Some flaws of Choicescript:
Frequent complaints about syntax errors can be frustrating for new programmers.
Even a single bug will often cause the entire rest of the game to become unplayable.
Moderately advanced programming techniques can require complicated workarounds that make them even more difficult.
It is proprietary software with a revenue share that authors may consider inadequate.
Obviously, there’s no guarantee of success but the situation isn’t hopeless either.
Very powerful ways to control story flow and choices, but data manipulation is clunky, and things like string editing (or much of anything with strings really) generally require modifying the runner
Designed to be embedded into other projects, so any styling and layout beyond the absolute basics is up to the runner, not the Ink code
Some but not all different types of things (variables, LIST entries, knots, etc) share a namespace and it can be difficult to remember which do and which don’t
Syntax mistakes often cause it to still compile but show the wrong behavior, instead of halting compilation like in ChoiceScript, which can make debugging hard
I believe the disconnect is simply that you’re pitching a tool for beginners to a mostly experienced audience.
I agree. There have been several attempts at web based authoring. If this is got right and aimed at beginners, it could be a winner.
What I see missing from current offerings is how to program the inevitable game logic. I’m seeing well implemented simple choice systems that connect “scenes”, but as yet no conditionals.
Sooner or later you’re going to need decisions.
Of course, if aimed at beginners, it has to be easy to pick up and run. @Hidnook nailed it with;
A good IF tool has a low skill floor and a high ceiling.
And that would also apply to any programming facility. The idea of “no code” is a mythical one. If you’re connecting dots visually to establish logic, you’re still programming.
One extreme abandons the author to an unforgiving command line console, and the other slaps them in the face with a zillion click-boxes and drop-downs.
Neither is the right answer, but what is? That’s the question.
But as we know beginners turn into intermediates who turn into advanced, so any platform that wants longevity and the better products that come from those later stages of development need to support them. As you’ve pointed out conditionals are one of the first requirements.
I gather the idea here was to tap into a nascent market of frustrated creators. Anyone with a camera-phone and an internet connection can record a YT short or a TikTok and become “a creator” why not IF “shorts” and make bank?
Except I don’t believe that market exists for IF in the same way as for music or video or books.
All three formats are linear with the same experience for everyone. Stepping into IF (as distinct from a VN) is to step into game design and thinking in terms of systems and mechanics.
At this point I think the audience dwindles. Now at internet scale it could still be pretty big overall, but you have the long-tail problem of how to reach them from a standing start.
I’m agnostic about how popular IF could in theory be or what form that might take. But if someone did manage to do something that became really popular I’d bet it would be through a game, not starting as a tool.
The OP also seems to be pitching a non-free (as in freedom) cloud based platform that they control. I could be wrong, but this seems integral to their idea for how to monetize and make the project worth it to them. If Google or whoever wanted to ask my opinion of their platforms I’d say the same thing (no thanks). The only difference is they already own everything and we’re forced to use their platforms, and they aren’t asking for opinions.
I think the real issue for me that there are two separate things potentially being considered here: an authoring system and a distribution platform. From the user’s perspective I don’t see any real reason for those things to be linked; it only makes sense from the platform’s perspective, as a way to lock creators into the platform.
Also, while the creation of a better authoring system would in theory require mainly technical competence, the creation of a platform that attracts both high-quality authors and actual paying players is a much more difficult marketing/business problem. So the promise of a new authoring system is at least partially a way for a software developer to convince themself they have something new to offer, without really solving why platforms like borogove.io, textadventures.co.uk, and (for the most part) Itch have not become commercially viable marketplaces for IF.