New intFic Software - iFStudio

Technical Development Development Systems
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Hi all — I’m Thornbrooke, developer of iFStudio, a plugin for the Unity 6 Editor that lets you author choice-based interactive fiction visually and export it as a single self-contained HTML file. My proof-of-concept title, Mourning Star (a Frankenstein retelling), is being built entirely in the tool to keep me honest about what it actually needs.

Some questions answered

Do you need an account to write? No. iFStudio is a desktop tool. However, You do need Unity installed (the free tier is fine), which means a Unity account and a fairly heavy install. The goal is to develop a standalone program identify if the concept has a demand

What does it do that Twine / Ink / ChoiceScript struggle with? Two things.

  1. Author first writing: Draft content and choices without needing to use code and add effects stats and expressions using buttons and dropdowns

  2. Character Sheets: Use pre-built character sheets with customizable data fields and variable types

    UI Images

    Draft2
    Draft21918×1012 136 KB

    Draft3
    Draft3546×720 22.1 KB
    Draft4
    Draft4987×725 46.3 KB

What does it struggle with that those tools do well? Plenty, and specialization is fine.

  • It’s choice-based only.
  • No plain scripting. Great for those without coding experience but limited for legacy iF writers.
  • Unity Asset. Since it’s an asset for Unity 6, a user needs to download the program before using iFStudio.
  • No built-in distribution or community like Choice of Games’ Hosted Games pipeline. You publish it yourself.
  • It’s new and small — one developer, early days, no track record yet. Worth knowing before you commit a novel to it.
  • No AI writing features. Deliberate, but flagging it, since some people expect it now.

Can you publish / share outside the platform? Yes — that’s a major point for this project. Export is a single self-contained HTML file with no DRM, no login, no server. Host it on itch.io, your own site, anywhere. Reader themes and reading modes are baked into the export.

Local saves? Offline editing? Authoring is fully local and offline — your project lives on your disk, no cloud dependency, and you can work with no connection at all. [Reader-side save/load inside the exported HTML]

Complex mechanics, variables, functions? iFStudio uses dropdowns and buttons to build complex equations that allow branching storylines and conditional text snippets, all without writing macros or scripts.

Does the story tree handle relatively linear storylines easily? Yes. The editor is a node graph, but a linear story is just a chain of pages — trivial to build. Branching is where the graph earns its keep, but linearity isn’t fought.

What debugging features are there? Currently there is a Preview Debug Panel that shows actual values and reader position during a playthrough, with plans to release thorough reports on variable usage, choice flows, and conditional text stubs.

I have a lot more to share, but for now, I’ll answer any other questions you guys may have.

Thanks for having me.

  • Thornbrooke
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Do you have an example of the output (i.e. the game)?

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Will it remain in Unity 6 after the major move to Unity 7? I understand that anything made with Unity 6 will still work, in theory, just the same in Unity 7. I’m a member of my local game development club and many of them use Unity. If I were to collaborate with them and I needed Unity 7 for that, would there be a software collision between versions of Unity use for this work vs their work?

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My goal is to make sure this works for U7 as well. Until and if iFS gets into a standalone dev. I’ll do some more research on the effort though. Thanks!

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I have a small example I’ve been working on, but wanted to hold off on sharing until i got some more content to explore. I’ll upload an example today though!

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Ok, this link should work. I added it to my github as a page. the copy is rough at best and plain / nonsensical at its worse, but i think it shows a decent range of the conditional text and choice logic.

Mourning Star (Demo)

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This actually looks pretty interesting, especially the character sheet side of it. A lot of visual IF tools make branching easy but still become awkward once you start tracking a larger cast and a decent number of variables.

For me, the biggest barrier would definitely be requiring Unity. If you eventually turn this into a standalone editor while keeping the same single-file HTML export, I think it would become much easier to recommend to writers who have no game-dev background.

One thing I’d be curious about is the underlying project format. Are stories stored in something reasonably readable/version-control friendly, or is most of the data locked into Unity assets? Being able to use Git, diff changes, and recover or migrate a large project would matter quite a bit before committing a novel-length story to a new tool.

I’d also be interested in how you plan to handle testing large branching projects — things like unreachable nodes, variables that are never set, impossible conditions, and choices that lead to dead ends.

Using Mourning Star as a real production test is a good approach. That should expose the pain points much faster than building features around hypothetical use cases.

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That looks good! I’m not really in the target market for this as an author, but the play experience is pretty nice so if you reach the point where you (or anyone else) are writing substantial games with it I’ll be happy to see them!

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For the Unity issue, is the concern downloading such a large program? Adding the iFStudio asset?

My idea was to build a lightweight tool before building a standalone program (honestly it might have been easier to build the standalone first because unity has been a PAIN).

An author would download the program, and the asset, then when they want to right, open unity and launch the tool. I’m rather tech savvy, so I hadn’t considered that workflow to be an issue.

As far as the project format goes, it currently uses Unity’s .asset file type. This would be changed but that is a good point as it hasn’t been a major concern for me yet. I’ll have to look into that, so thanks for the reminder.

Version history is a big concern for me. I haven’t developed a lot of that yet outside of archiving content when a user selects delete (for later restoration if needed), but it’s on the plan.

Regarding testing and verifications, I have a “run reports” tool that looks for variables and conditions that aren’t used, as well as dead ends, but it’s not fully hardened yet. That being said, that and version history is a significant part of development and would. Need to be fully functional before a full release.

This feedback is extremely helpful BTW! Thank you. Keep it coming!

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I think you’ve answered your own question. The learning curve for starting with Unity is quite steep, as is the overhead for running Unity. (I say that as a Unity developer.) Your tool is likely only going to be useful to people who already use Unity. Honestly, my first reaction to your post was to wonder why anyone would use Unity to build an HTML page, because it sounds kind of crazy. I’m not saying that to be dismissive or insulting - our entire hobby is kind of crazy. And I can kind of see why you might want to build a front-end UI in Unity, because the editor’s panel system provides a relatively easy way to connect form fields to data structures – much easier than doing it by hand. But still, you might have trouble bringing people along for the ride. You might do better to publish an executable (though I guess that would probably mean rebuilding the UI into a GUI layer rather than the editor’s panel system, and at that point, you might as well build it in HTML).

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Thanks for the feedback, that makes a lot of sense. :slight_smile: