Hello! About 5 months ago I started writing my very first interactive fiction. A little over a week ago I posted it online on a patreon(for free of course) to try and get some feedback. I have written on and off for years but I’ve never posted anything publicly so not sure if it’s good or something people would be interested in reading. I’ve had quite a few people view the post but I haven’t gotten any of the feedback I’ve really been hoping to get.
Please if anyone is willing to read the chapter and provide feedback I would really appreciate it. It’s currently just one chapter, a little over 100,000 words total and 113 passages, I plan to have 4 RO’s but only three are introduced in the first chapter. Even the first chapter is highly replayable and I plan to have alot of diversity in the branching paths.
If anyone is interested please let me know and I will send you the link. Or if you’d rather the patreon is Labella Dynasty and the story is called Trials of a Siren: The Fall of Illuvia. I’ve added an itchio link to the patreon.
Is there a way to play this online (i.e. without having to download the HTML file?)
How much of the text will a player see per playthrough? (A rough % is fine)
100k words is a pretty big story by the standards of the community, so without any descriptions or indications of how long a typical playthrough is it’s a little intimidating to pick up. Being able to play it in browser instead of downloading a file from an unknown creator would also help with engagement. (Itch.io lets you set a game to private and password protect it, so that might be a good route to take.)
If you don’t get any bites here, I might also recommend looking at the Choice of Games forum even if you’re not writing in Choicescript. Games of that length are pretty common in that neck of the woods so you might get more bites.
One read through is approx. 40,000 words, I admit that it’s alot and that I’m essentially planning this to be four separate novels combined, it takes me a little under an hour to read through it. I added an itchio link and password to the patreon, and the summary in my bio sums it up probably better than I will here but it’s essentially a romance about mermaids at war with a group of humans hunting them down for their magic. You play a Siren, a rarity among merfolk and the only one your people believe can stop the war raging on your border. As you come of age and you begin encountering humans for the first time you have to decide whether or not peace can be made, if it will even stop your temple from falling and if everything you believed was as true as your people thought.
Gave this a try, an intriguing beginning! You clearly put a lot of thought into the worldbuilding. On the itch.io version I’m having an issue though where there I can’t scroll down on any pages? I can’t get past the point where the protagonist visits the lagoon with their mother, because I just cannot see the links to advance.
That’s a common issue with itch. The author needs to enable scroll bars in the project settings. In the meantime, you can right click on the game and select “This frame” → “Show only this frame”.