Must be something in the zeitgeist. This also seems fascinating to me, and there are a few games in the Thing this year that take some steps in that direction! Both The Roads Not Taken and Stygian Dreams took some bold steps that were intriguing. As promising as both those are, I found The Mamertine caught my imagination the most on this front, though its engagement with the hybrid model was quite different. More like what could it unlock.
6 Likes
This is kind of a white whale of mine, too, having text input sections in a Twine game to hide options and open up the combinatorial space.
The Roads Not Taken is a step in this direction, but itâs all parser. It plays more like âtype the hidden linksâ rather than a regular world model. My idea would be to have some complex state that can be manipulated via text input and choices, so the player cannot simply backtrack their way through the story.
6 Likes
Not to be that person, but TADS natively offers clickable links, and only requires an HTML TADS interpreter like QTADS to work. It does not require anything a wild as Vorple. The links also appear for screen readers, though I have heard that screen reader users prefer to type in their commands.
6 Likes
Does TADS offer native multimedia? Music, sound, images?
Thatâs what I was hoping for Inform 10 - that itâd have hyperlinks built in which when clicked would issue a text command, or just follow a set of normal rules, like
After clicking "Go to the Airport.":
now the player wears traveling clothes;
now the player carries tweed suitcase;
now the player is in Airport Terminal;
reduce stamina by 100;
say "Well, now that was an exhausting three hours... But you're here.".
3 Likes
Yeah TADS supports images and several tracks of simultaneous sound, for sound effects, voice lines, background music, and ambient music (last time I read the docs)
EDIT: The only reason why Iâm not putting the full audio experience in my games is because Iâm afraid the audio will obstruct the sound of a screen reader, and images take me too long to make to be worthwhile.
EDIT 2: Also, TADS tells you what the capabilities are available for the current interpreter, so if the terp doesnât support sound or hyperlinks or images or whatever, then you can check that, and modify how your game works to accommodate.
In I Am Prey, for example, I use alternative outputs, if hyperlinks are not available, and then I use a modified version of @blindHunterâs accessibility module to ask if a screen reader is being used, and then I modify punctuation, layout, and how certain things are worded to better-accommodate screen readers, too. So you donât have to worry about if the player has the right terps; you can be flexible with it.
If youâre going full-tilt and have no flexibility in your project design (valid), then you can also use these terp stats to alert the player that they should use a specific interpreter, right when the game loads.
EDIT 3: More info on sound, specifically, can be found here. HTML TADS is the kind with hyperlinks and stuff, butâagainâif the interpreter doesnât support HTML TADS, then you can check that when the game is running. I think (85% certainty) that non-HTML TADS supports images? Because one of the interpreter types is âtext onlyâ, which implies images do not need HTML TADS, but sound and hyperlinks do.
3 Likes
I think The Kuelema was both a success as a game and as a demonstration of what can be done with Google Forms, though you canât please everyone as that would require that everyone has the same taste.
Also, I think it shows that players may accept âminor problemsâ when it is not caused by the authorâs laziness or lack of skills. For instance, it is possible in The Kuelema to see your progress and then reach another room, see that your progress is now further and then return to a place you have been before and suddenly see that your progress has âbeen set backâ. This is not really the case but when I first experienced this I was slightly confused. Thus I learned how to play a Google Forms game and realized that practically no information is stored by the game.
So in a way, playing Google Forms games require a bit of getting used to, just as parser games do. However, if they can be made without any sort of programming that is just great. I hope that other authors will be inspired and make more Google Forms games, assuming the game fits the system so probably no turn-based combat in that system etc.
4 Likes
Yes, I could have been more explicit about this. Google Forms has a pretty simple point-and-click interface for building pages. Itâs fairly remarkable that Kuolema is âcode-free,â unless thereâs some advanced Google Forms guru-ness going on behind the scenes.
I also appreciate the browser-based, zero-install aspect of gameplay (although I saw that some folks had problems with pop-ups and such).
5 Likes
Oh, you are not kidding about that. I am currently compiling Spice Girl statistics.
8 Likes
I am so looking to see how the Girl group will end up looking at the end of the festival 
5 Likes
I just went to open the map and Survival Guide for âI Am Preyâ by clicking the links on the Spring Thing site, but Iâm getting a 404 error for both.
4 Likes
I will fix th at in the next ten minutes.
6 Likes
I just finished âRepeat the Endingâ. It was definitely interesting and at times very sad. I am not a completionist so I only completed it once. If it had been the typical Zork game I would probably have pursued the points but it wasnât so I completed it with 2 points out of 33 possible. Luckily, the author made all endings available after completing the game so I read them all. It would have been a bit cumbersome to replay many times to get all combinations of points.
Also, I did not read every footnote etc. so I probably missed some stuff but I felt I got the main idea.
However, I was wondering why we are supposed to screw up as much as possible to get the true ending? My best bet is that we usually learn from our mistakes more than our successes so the more mistakes we make, the more enlightened we will become? but perhaps I missed something important?
8 Likes
I suspect Drew would say the interpretation that you come away with and resonates with you is the one that matters, but for what itâs worth I thought the reading in @jjmccâs review was satisfying (I tested the game but havenât yet replayed it in final form, so Iâll defer my own thoughts for now!)
9 Likes
Let me rephrase that. You canât reach self-loathing nirvana without first failing as hard as you can, whereupon you find your greatest achievement is simultaneously your worst failure. But I canât speak for Drew.
7 Likes
Hereâs one possible interpretation:
Depression and deep-seated self-loathing tend to make it so that mistakes feel like the end of the world. Anything you do wrong is confirmation that youâre worthless, you only ever make things worse, and you should never have even tried. (This description feels like itâs really underselling the, I donât know, intensity? of that reaction, but Iâm too tired right now to do better, sorry. I am deeply and personally acquainted with it, though!) The âoriginal versionâ of the game reflects that mindset by having anything you do wrong result in an abrupt and final game-over. But you canât access the better outcomes in the âremakeâ as long as youâre still convinced you canât make mistakes; you can only get there by actively defying that mindset and accepting, even embracing, failure.
8 Likes
Ooh, I like that read too. By making the failures non-sequitor and sometimes flat out absurdly funny, it also seemed to reinforce the âhow bad is this really?â idea.
If I may be so bold, you are also missing some really good funny by not courting at least the early fail states!
6 Likes
I was amused to note a similarity between Insomnia and Write or Reflectâwell, WoR in helpful mode, anyway! Both have a possibility of going to endings youâve seen before. (Insomnia has a bit more writing as a payoff!)
But they have different mechanisms for helping you to find all the different endings, so to speak.
Also, Iâd like to thank the author for an early encouraging note to me about WoR. I hope this is good payback. So any suggestions here are âItâd be neat to do this too!â
WoRâs helpful mode lets you know if youâre about to walk into a node where all endings are covered. So you will get there, and rather quickly, by trial and error. It forces you to find the right path, which may be too harsh.
But Insomnia leaves a bit of a puzzle. Itâs quite up-front about things and I think even the endings seem to be organized so that, say, ending #1 is âfirst choice all the way throughâ and #26 is âlast choice all the way through.â So you have a neat idea of what you can target and when and how. Thereâs some neat intuition here that I like, because while I enjoy branching Twine games, I sort of cringe at having to look at the source to knock off that last ending or two. Whether or not the endings diverge as much as Insomnia!
So Iâm not aware of anything else that handles the endings as Insomnia does. But Iâd be interested to see others, because I think itâs a great idea well-executed that helps it go beyond âyet another zany Twine game with clever fun writing.â
I think this opens up possibilities for creating Twine-ish paths elsewhere, maybe even allowing the player a difficulty knob of how much they want to spoil.
For instance, you could have a counter saying, once youâve hit all the endings in the UFO branch (there are four) two times, that one is blocked off somehow or the node is bumped back! It seems like this would be tricky to do in Twine, but it would allow for a VERY branching game with even more endings than 26 so that the playerâs energy would focus less on staying patient and juggling endings and more on the writing.
(Another neat idea, especially if the game had meta components, would be to allow the player maybe 2-3 glimpses at a branching ending map. Or maybe even label the endings 11111, etc., based on which choice gets you somewhere in the minimum tries.)
Insomnia is definitely a fun light-hearted read but it brings up some (to me) engaging, serious issues of how to keep the playerâs attention and the niceties we should add to help them along and feel the optimal amount of stuck so we had a neat challenge, without giving up!
All these considerations, though, are nothing to lose sleep over. Ha ha ha.
6 Likes
Hi all! Thanks for playing and talking about my game.
Mikeâs right! I donât want to take away anyoneâs freedom to interpret Repeat the Ending for themselves.
So I wonât say what things mean (how would you know if Iâm telling the truth?), but I will/can say general things about the project. For instance: the main throughline of RTE is less than a third of the total experience in terms of code and printed text.
Itâs possible that, depending on the amount of Repeat the Ending that you see, it may make more or less sense.
Thanks again for talking about my game! I wonât butt in again unless somebody @'s me, so feel free to draw your own conclusions without my meddling. 
8 Likes
Thanks for playing and reviewing my game!
Thank you, I really appreciate the work and thought you put into this post!
Thatâs an interesting observation! I didnât actually have any conscious meaning or purpose in mind for how I ordered the endings in the Accomplishments screen. I remember what I did was just search for âThe Endâ in my Twine project to find all my ending nodes. Then I worked my way roughly left to right in the tree to add the macro that recorded what ending was found to those nodes. The endings that were found through the longest paths ended up at the end of the list because I had to scroll down to get to them last. 
I like this idea of cutting off branches that are completely exhausted on subsequent playthroughs. It should probably be an option that the user can toggle, perhaps like you suggest linked to a difficulty setting. (Easy - disable links to completed branches, Hard - donât show already visited links in a different color.)
Giving each ending a number that encodes the path the user took to get there is a nifty idea. You could even say itâs the number of the universe in which the story took place, kind of like how they do it in comic books.
I definitely did want to keep the player engaged and motivated to see the entire story, and minimize the amount of time wasted going through already explored paths. Iâm happy to hear my efforts made an impression on you!
5 Likes
Iâm now getting 403 errors for both versions of the map.
3 Likes