I wish I could take all the credit for this structure, but the formula of “prologue to build your character, several chapters you can look at in any* order that change your stats and set all sorts of variables, leading inexorably to a finale with mostly flavor choices, then an epilogue” is Choice of Games’s specialty! Loose Ends in particular owes a debt to Night Road, which is the game that inspired it (quite directly—via one of my tabletop players going “hey could we adapt the Varkonyi storyline from this game into an IF in a similar way?”).
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For what it’s worth, I’ve used the choice-based framework Ink to make multiple games that have a classic “move between different rooms solving puzzles” adventure game structure (for example, The Restricted Archive is a fairly traditional point & click adventure, and the levels in Lid Astray are similar to a traditional text adventure, but without a parser). So you can absolutely use that sort of structure in a choice-based setting, without having to think of it as a “branching narrative,” or even “faking” a branching narrative as suggested by others.
I recently started my first Inform 7 project, and I’m definitely getting fed up with having to e.g. spend a bunch of effort making it respond reasonably to SIT IN CHAIR, simply because the setting is a waiting room, which logically needs chairs, which in turn means that the player will potentially want to SIT IN CHAIR, so I have to account for this so the parser doesn’t say “you can’t sit on that,” even though the ability to sit does nothing useful plot-wise… but in choice-based IF you can avoid all that by just not giving the choice to sit.
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If you’re spending a bunch of effort on something ultimately trivial to your game, I’d suggest not focusing as much attention on it. Sure, it helps immersion if your waiting room has chairs to sit in and occupants to talk to and occasional people who come in and call randomized names, but you really don’t need that. If it’s not relevant, don’t waste the effort and just guide the player away. It can be “All the chairs are already taken” or “You don’t have time to pretend to be (a) patient” or “The waiting room, strangely enough, does not have any chairs. You wonder how the designers thought this would pan out.”
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The issue is that I kinda feel like 95% of the point of using a parser in the first place is immersion + the feeling that you can do whatever you want (within reason)?
My current plan is to just do something like:
Instead of sitting in the chair, say "You sit down. The chair is uncomfortable, and after a while you get back up again."
but I’m worried that this feels like denying player agency.
Anyways, I’m probably gonna go back to Ink pretty quick. It’s just that I have this one idea that I feel would benefit from a parser because I’m specifically trying to invoke the feeling of being in a situation where none of the “official” ways of doing things are working & you have to make a deliberate choice to break the rules. Presenting an explicit choice to e.g. “jump the turnstile” or “hit the vending machine” kinda undermines that feeling.
But so far I feel like the parser is mostly just creating problems for me. I keep hitting situations where I want to create bespoke options that are a pain to implement mechanically, and I hate the cardinal direction navigation but keep encountering problems when trying to enable other forms of navigation.
Anyways, sorry for ranting I guess.
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29 posts were split to a new topic: Increasing Agency and Nonlinearity in Choice Narratives
I’ve been here before. Before experimenting with Inform and IF works, I did a lot of solo projects and prototypes in several engines and languages. Python, Unity, Construct 3 (easiest to quickly prototype). Sometimes making something completely mindless helped me get back on track.
Maybe try making several small projects that are simplistic in nature. For example, a “one room” type Inform game that has severala small puzzles and one large puizzle. Sort of like an escape room. Maybe just make a simplistic Twine game. Something just to get the creative mind flowing and more in tune to create and program.
Another idea is to “demake” one of your favorite game titles in Inform. It’ll give you a sense of enjoyment that you’re recreating a personal favorite. It could again be a small “demake.”
You may also want to evaluate your scope of the project. Is it something that’s reasonable for you to complete or is the scope too large. Sometimes I would set myself up for failure by just selecting too grandiose of an idea.
Just some ideas.
Best.