Hello everyone, I’m in the process of launching a free online interactive story platform currently called Story Builders World. The project is already online, but only days old, and very early alpha with minimal features. This community looks like the experts on interactive stories. I’m looking for (realistic) ideas, community priorities, and testers. I’m an old school role-player with lots of text and rpg experience, an avid reader, and a principal software engineer starting to branch out into my own app platforms.
I don’t have any experience with Twine or other interactive story platforms, and I’m hesitant to directly use them so as to minimize liability and not violate anyone’s terms of service or licensing. Instead, I’d much rather hear from a community of interactive fiction writers what kinds of things are important to you and what features you can’t live without.
A brief description of the platform is that it allows users to create interactive stories by defining content blocks linked to content choices linked to other content blocks. Creators can publish stories for free, and make them public for everyone or restrict them to groups that require membership. Someday I hope to facilitate monetization for creators by allowing them to sell stories or group access as one time fees or subscriptions.
You can try it out yourself (remember, early alpha, very few features) at storybuildersworld.com if interested, but really I’d love to talk to the community here and understand the needs if possible.
Trying to build an interactive story platform without any experience of existing tools seems like a very bad idea to me, like trying to build a car without ever having used a car.
Anyways, some things that matter to me:
ability to save projects locally
ability to share the resulting game freely, not tied to a particular distribution platform or proprietary license
interoperability with other development tools
sufficiently sophisticated scripting tools to create meaningful mechanics, not just a branching narrative
ability to encapsulate useful chunks of story/code into more manageable, ideally reusable components
ability to write relatively linear or shallowly-branching-and-merging sequences without having to click some sort of “new node/choice” button a ton of times for every tiny single-line node or choice.
Thank you for the reply. This is exactly the kind of feedback useful to me as a developer. There’s some really good stuff in there. But first, I should clarify that I have zero interest in reproducing Twine. That is a fundamenally different kind of tool than the cloud platform I am creating. And legal liability for reverse engineering is very real. In most software development the best requirements are gathered from the target audience anyway, not competing products, so if people provide the kind of feedback you just did, I would have a good chance of success even without using the competition’s products. Case in point, the software product we produce in my day job competes with other products that no one in our company has ever seen or used (proprietary, not available to the public). We rely on our audience for feedback and input. Most of my career has been spent building software products in industries where I am not a domain expert, with good success. The key is finding domain experts (not necessarily being one) to give opinions, advice, and feedback.
Some questions:
What is the purpose of being able to save project files locally in a cloud platform? What problem does this solve for the user? I’m genuinely interested.
The ability to share the resulting game freely is part of the platform. This is a cloud platform though, not a desktop app, and the entire purpose is to create platform specific content, to be consumed on the platform, by platform players. Future monetization for creators is platform exclusive.
Interoperability with other tools is hard, but understandable. IF that was was a future feature, list and rank the top three tools in order that you’d want to be able to import from.
Please explain the “sufficiently sophisticated scripting tools to create meaningful mechanics, not just a branching narrative” point. I am deeply interested in understanding this better.
Reusable chunks of “story/code” is interesting. Is that specific to logic related to stories, or actual story content blocks as well? For example, would you have say a scene or location description block that you want to reuse across many different stories because they all involve that scene/location? My first draft has story blocks unique to stories, but that could be changed.
Can you elaborate on the last point about linear or shallow branching stories without new node/choice buttons? This has my interest piqued. How do you have choice going from A to B without a choice node? How does a player go from one story block to another in that scenario? Is this like a “next page” kind of thing where you just want to link two story blocks with no choices? I genuinely want to understand the use case here so I can support it.
Thank you again, very helpful.
Also, if anyone else on these forums wants to respond to the above with your own answers and explanations, that would be great! The more the merrier.
This may sound harsh, but IF creators here want control over their own stories and the ability to edit them locally and distribute them freely. Unless you have monetization working and implemented, with a guaranteed audience/market and a guaranteed way for creators to make money right now, there is zero incentive for people to jump onto a new and incomplete platform-locked IF creation tool. Especially when numerous open source projects like Twine and Ink already exist and are better. More features, larger communities.
Every once in a while people get ideas for monetized IF platforms and they rarely work out. I can barely think of successful examples of monetized IF platforms, to be honest, besides Choice of Games and ChoiceScript. Go look at what they’re doing to see what you’ll need to get comparable success. A new platform that has nothing to offer over the alternatives will not get users.
Typically, in this IF space, people want something standardized to play on. For choice-based works, this is usually an HTML file.
Variables, logic (e.g. if/then), integration with some sort of scripting language (e.g. JavaScript). Basically, give authors the tools they need to implement their own mechanics, outside of what comes built-in.
Functions and the ability to loop back to a previous page (e.g. a town square). Exportable functions would be nice to have, too (e.g. if you code a world model in one story, being able to add it to another).
Having a way to link two story blocks without choices, or gradually showing a single choice block via clicking or another action, within the same page.
Firstly, most IF platforms have a very broad range of acceptable usage, including commercial use. Feel free to experiment with them and see what they do.
I strongly suggest you look at some choice-based works on IFDB or from the recent IFComp and see what they implement. For instance, Moon Logic has a world model reminiscent of a parser game.
Of course, we are far from the only IF community out there!
Thank you for your detailed response. I must admit to being a bit surprised by the coding references you made. I assumed the average IF creator would not want to do actual programming. Are IF creators actually writing JavaScript and such in these other tools?
This is a dealbreaker for me, and I suspect for many others as well. The ability to retain control of my game and distribute it however I wish without being tied to a specific platform that may very well be discontinued at any moment is vital to me.
That’s good, because Twine is already a well-established tool that your platform will not be able to replace, so trying to do something different is pretty much the only way you’ll succeed. But I think that Avery’s point wasn’t that you should know about Twine so that you can replicate it, it’s that you should be at least familiar with the features that other platforms provide in order to understand what you’re trying to make.
Because as it is you seem completely unfamiliar with the product you’re trying to make. What people have asked for (scripting tools, reusable code, variables, linear and shallow-branching stories) are extremely basic things and you’re responding with confusion at the concept.
So, why exactly are you here? It clearly isn’t passion for the medium.
This is very fair feedback and I’m prepared to accept that feedback. It was my intention to seed the platform with some X number of interactive stories myself and see what response I can get from players across various communities. My sense was that I probably needed to understand what kinds of IF players expect via the creator community making said games. I agree that without monetization now, there’s no incentive to use the platform for creators. Perhaps if it was extremely robust and full-featured, that would be an incentive even without monetization, but it’s certainly not right now. If it ends up being the case that IF creators really don’t want another offering in the market, I’m prepared to accept that as well.
My confusion at the concept of IF creators doing real programming was my assumption that real programming was the actual barrier to entry in creating IF, and that if I built a good enough platform that obscured the actual programming, it would lower the skill level required and enable more IF creators. I may be completely wrong about that. It’s also possible this is an exceptionally skilled community that is beyond the audience I thought I was planning for. Or both.
I may have mistakenly associated my adjacent experiences as a role-player, fiction writer, game maker, and visual novel consumer as being close enough to help me bridge the gap, but what I’m hearing this community say loud and clear is that it doesn’t want an outsider making a product, it wants an insider designed product. I can accept that feedback.
It’s less about outsider vs insider and more about willingness to learn. If you come in here without having done any sort of research, probably not having played any games from what it looks like, outright admitting you know nothing about the platforms we use, it’s hard to have much faith in what you’re doing. It’s good that you’re soliciting feedback, but we really shouldn’t have to explain to you the very basics of the medium, you know. Just play some games. Look at Twine and Ink and Choicescript. Do some research.
Regarding the programming issue, a good platform, as Hidnook put it, has a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling. This is why Twine was so successful. If you want to just write a basic story with some branching you need no coding knowledge whatsoever, but if you want to do more complicated things you have a wide variety of tools, up to and including the entirety of Javascript.
All in favor of offering something new that’s not covered by existing platforms! But in order to do that, you need to know what those existing platforms don’t provide, what needs are not being met, surely?
Fortunately, this isn’t a very litigious community. Most of the popular tools are open source. But also, system behavior isn’t something that can be copyrighted or trademarked, and since there’s very little money at stake, patents are scarce in the IF world. Getting a sense of what the existing tools can and can’t do is the best way to figure out what niche is going unfilled.
This community has been around a long time, and we’ve seen a lot of promising new cloud platforms appear, flourish for a short time, then vanish completely—taking everyone’s work with them. People are (rightly!) hesitant to invest in a new platform if everything they build on that platform could disappear at any moment. AXMA, Versu, and Varytale are some prominent examples.
This is going to be a hard sell, for the same reasons as above. This community cares a lot about archivability and futureproofing; if the content can’t be used outside your platform, then everything everyone writes will disappear as soon as the platform is no longer profitable.
The biggest three choice-based IF platforms at the moment are Twine, ChoiceScript, and Ink. Twine is the biggest one in this community, but ChoiceScript is the biggest overall, and Ink is the most interoperable.
In choice-based IF, you’ll often want to have various “fake choices” to break up long stretches of text without any real consequences. They help keep players engaged, and players enjoy them for characterization even when they don’t change the story much. Ink and ChoiceScript both make these very easy to implement.
Many are! Like others have said, the ideal IF design tool has a low floor and a high ceiling. It’s easy to get started, but you can also do complicated things without running into the limits of the medium.
I would agree with this. I recommend playing some highly-rated IF in this community, trying out some of the existing open-source tools, and seeing what needs are currently not being met.
It’s less that we don’t want outsider-designed products, and more that it’s hard to fill a niche without understanding that niche. There are a lot of open-source tools out there; what is yours going to offer that’s worth the platform lock?
That’s not a rhetorical question—my legitimate feedback is, you need some big selling points if you want people to invest their time and energy in a platform that might disappear at any time and take all their work with it.
Alright, I accept that feedback. I should have done more research. I could have come into the community under a different account and anonymously asked lots of questions, without mentioning my platform, just inquiring about existing tools, and it sounds like that might have been better received. I thought I was doing the right thing by being transparent and open. I gave my real name and made no pretenses.
With the help of this community, I have already come to see a few things.
IF is an ecosystem with deep connection to established tools.
IF creators value independence.
IF appears to me to be very fractured.
Choice of Games is a highly restricted “pro” platform selling content. Heavy filtering of content, only 150+ stories, not thousands or millions like I would someday hope for.
This is not an IF creator platform, it’s a business selling IF content, paying authors fees and royalties, acting much like a traditional publisher.
Choose Your Story is the closest platform I’ve seen to what I’m building, but is extremely basic and low quality as a player. I can provide a more modern, enterprise grade experience.
It is actually a platform, open to everyone from what I see, and does have some measure of stories and players. For example, I looked at one story randomly and it had been played 4,000+ times.
I don’t see publishing and monetization for creators as being very structured in IF. Maybe people use Patreon or something. Seems like it’s challenging to publish content consistently, to a large audience, and to produce income.
How does any IF creator earn a living doing it?
IF creator capabilities range widely, far more widely than I expected.
Choice of Games and Choose Your Story both have less features than most open source IF tools like Twine, but are fairly successful despite that. I would expect both to be considered very “basic” by the standards I’ve already heard about here.
I underestimated how skilled some IF creators might actually be. “No code” platforms are all the rage right now, but in this specific community, there’s a strong interest in advanced complexity and mechanics even if having to code it yourself.
Content ownership is king. Creators do not want content trapped in a platform.
My FAQ explicitly states full IP and ownership to creators, but I can understand that platform specific content is unappealing if someone wants to “publish” in generic formats to a wide variety of places, whatever those maybe.
I assumed that finding players for IF stories/games is the second biggest blocker to success for IF creators, with number one being the creation of an IF story.
I’m now unclear over what degree finding and managing players actually matters to IF creators.
Tool quality to create stories does sound like the biggest priority.
Advanced IF creators may reject basic tooling.
I am getting the impression that this specific community cares far more about quality, crafting, and execution of a vision than pumping out content.
I’m certainly not trying to move anyone’s cheese or say that what you’re doing isn’t working for you. If I think about video content, YouTube is king. There is a strong monetization model for creators there that is reliable, even if it is tough to break into. There is some amount of creator tooling built into the platform, but advanced editing is generally outside the platform. I started thinking about IF in similar terms a couple weeks ago and built a quick prototype based on “no code” for authors with community management. I came here to get feedback, ideas, insight and interest. This overall thread has been very enlightening. I think my target audience in hindsight was really more low-skill IF creators, and this is a community of very strong advanced IF creators, so me and my product are probably not a very good product-market-fit here, which is fine. To stretch the YouTube analogy even further, I was thinking about the world in terms of Shorts, not movies, which was also wrong for this community. I was not expecting to find full-fledged game developers creating complex mechanics, which is completely my mistake, since I didn’t spend any time lurking first.
You guys are great. Although the feedback is strong, and somewhat aggressive, you write well and have excellent points. Thank you.
Twine (especially the Harlowe format) can make functional games with very little code involved - the most basic games only require the author to add links to other nodes with basic link markup. But a little programming knowledge goes a long way, so there’s nothing stopping someone from making, say, a murder mystery with roving NPCs and a world model in Twine if they have the skill. If your system is too restrictive you will likely turn off more experienced authors who want to do something more complicated.
I think what you’ve just highlighted for me is that I really don’t understand what the ratio of IF stories to complexity metric is out in the world. How many people are satisfied with that basic functionality and produce basic stories? 50%? 80%? 95%? How many IF authors actually take the time to learn how to do the advanced stuff and actually do create roving NPCs and world model in Twine? And how much more successful is that for them? What is the ratio of players to complexity? Is it inherently higher? You get more players with more complex stories? I’m genuinely interested in the answers to these things. Thank you for highlighting how differently the same tool can be used.
That’s actually a really good question; I have no idea. The big comps usually get a mix of pieces with elaborate coding and pieces with standard branching and rejoining.
Some important context here is that it’s quite common for people to show up to this forum to plug their new tool/platform without understanding this community, the kinds of work we make and play, or the existing tools that we’re already using at all. So I think everyone is understandably a bit tired of that.
