I’m a developer and long time MUD player researching the IF creation space, and I’ve been getting interesting feedback from different communities. I’d love this forum’s perspective.
The pattern I’m seeing:
When I ask authors “what’s the hardest part of making text-based games?”, I expected answers about writing, coding, or balancing mechanics.
Instead, a surprising number of people say: “Getting anyone to actually play it.”
This got me thinking about whether the bigger gap is in authoring tools or discovery/distribution.
A few questions for this community:
After you finish a game, how do you get players? Do you post here, submit to competitions, put it on itch.io, something else? How well does that work?
Would a platform with built-in discovery help? Imagine publishing your game and it immediately shows up in a browsable catalog where players are already looking for new IF to play. Would that be valuable, or is the current ecosystem (IFDB, itch.io, competitions) sufficient?
On the creation side: what complexity level do you actually prefer?
Pure branching story (Twine-style)
Gamebook with stats and skill checks
Explorable world with rooms, objects, puzzles (Infocom-style)
Full RPG with progression systems
Multiplayer like MUDs?
I’ve been hearing that simpler is often better, that constraints actually boost creativity. Has that been your experience?
For those who’ve finished projects: Looking back, do you wish you’d kept it simpler? Or do you wish you’d added more complexity?
I’m exploring whether there’s room for a platform that combines easy creation (no-code for basics, extensible for power users) with built-in discovery. Trying to understand if that solves a real problem or if the current tools/ecosystem are good enough.
Thanks for any thoughts. This community’s perspective is especially valuable since you’re the serious IF creators.
I generally release IF into the major comps here (IFComp, Spring Thing, ECTOCOMP, Introcomp…), which means I get a nicely engaged audience as long as I stick to those comps’ requirements. I’ve been quite happy with the results!
Probably not. The audience for the comps here isn’t enormous, but they tend to be very engaged, and I get wonderful feedback, reviews, and so on. It would be hard for a new platform to get enough of an audience to outweigh that.
I guess you’d call it “Infocom-style”, though the state of the art has advanced a lot since then.
I have a lot of difficulty keeping things simple, but I don’t think that’s the platform’s fault. Scope creep is an omnipresent problem.
Sounds like kind of the same problem (at least the discovery part) that Choice of Games solves? There have also been a LOT of new platforms that have been posted to this forum lately, so you could check those threads for some discussion on what merits a new system (depending on what you mean by “platform”).
Playing > Project Announcements or one of the various competitions. Here, itch is mostly used for submitting to itch-based jams, not for hosting works. We generally like to have downloadable (and therefore archivable) files.
Not really. IFDB is the main place for that, and likely will remain the main place for that. See Storyfall for an example platform that tried to fill too many already-filled niches at once.
Different people prefer different things. As I’ve said before: a good platform has a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling. The parser-choice debate is probably one you need to decide on (or not—see Dialog) but it should be powerful enough for the author to decide for themselves what they want. Multiplayer is largely unnecessary, although a good multiplayer authoring tool would be something new.
I tend to keep the main idea simple and have deep levels of implementation. I just keep going deeper until I’m happy with things. So the level of complexity in my games is the level I’m happy with.
I only ever create stuff for competitions or jams because I need deadline pressure or I’ll get distracted by the next shiny idea and never finish. I do also put my stuff on Itch.
Itch basically already does this if you do a good job tagging your work, and for the stuff that doesn’t fit into the Itch tags that people commonly browse there’s IFDB—there’s a separate posting step involved there but it’s not that much work. (I do notice that my games kind of fall into two camps of getting most of their traffic from Itch internally or getting most of their traffic from IFDB—it’s rarely a close 50/50 or something that goes back and forth month by month.)
These aren’t complexity levels, these are broad categories of game type that can have various levels of complexity within each category, and my own works don’t fit neatly into any of them, but if what you’re really asking is “would you be happy with a platform that just did straight branching with no variables or conditionals or anything or would you want more than that”, I definitely want more than that. Incidentally, it’s clear you have no more than a vague “I have third-hand heard some stuff about this and not done any actual research” understanding of what Twine is and can do, and if you want to be competitive in this space you should maybe remedy that.
I always have various regrets but complexity levels usually do not come into it at all.
Well, you’ll have to compete with a whole bunch of other people who have had the same idea in the last several months.
As I see it, authoring and discovery are two totally different issues, and there’s little to no benefit to tying a new publishing/discoverability platform to a specific authoring system, or tying a new authoring system to a single publishing platform. Linking these two things can only hurt, either by making people interested in the new authoring system feel limited by the platform, or by turning people away from your platform who already have an authoring workflow that works for them.
Moreover, while it’s true that a platform with higher discoverability would be nice, the obvious question is “why does such a platform not already exist, and what is going to make your attempt more successful than past attempts?”
I think the “funnel” for IF players has three main hurdles:
Most gamers are not predisposed to playing text-based games.
Of the people who are interested in IF games, only some of them will be on any given platform.
Within a given platform, you must compete for attention with the other games on the platform (which, in the case of the largest platforms like Steam or Itch, also includes graphical video games).
So the question is: how can your platform differentiate itself with respect to these 3 hurdles? And how would tying on a new authoring system help with any of these hurdles?
I’d say finding an audience is probably one of the hardest things a creative can do with their work no matter their choosen medium, doubly so if they want to be financially profitable. Simple fact is, any platform with a sizeable user base, you’re likely to be one among thousands or in such a small niche no one will be looking and it’s practically a lottery that any given person will find your work and even have the opportunity to make a choice to give it a try. Even as small as IF is, there are thousands of entries on IFDB and hosted at IF Archive, and IF Comp is big enough that playing every entry would be a significant time commitment, especially if one were to try finishing every entry within the judging period.
There’s a reason big studios across all mediums spend millions in marketing, no matter how good their stuff is, it would take a lot longer to reach break even if they had to rely on platform discovery tools and word of mouth.
But, notably, many people still do! We’re a small community here, but a very dedicated one. Entering a game in a comp effectively guarantees a passionate audience—even for a game that (e.g. in the last Comp) becomes unplayable just a few days into the judging period. People still faithfully played and reviewed what little of it remained.
Really appreciate all the responses. They have really help to reign in my scope creep. I’ve decided to just build the text game that i’ve always wanted to build instead of thinking too much about how to build a platform and monetize.
All my games are published on itch, most of them are entries in jams or competitions that are also hosted on itch. I enter them in all the main databases (CASA, IFDB, IFWiki). I generally promote them on here, in various Discord servers, in various Facebook groups and on a couple of forums. Despite all that, I doubt that I get any new players that aren’t already in one or more of these communities because: (a) They don’t know that this form of entertainment exists. (b) They don’t venture into any of these communities, again because they don’t know they exist.
Incidentally, one of the big advantages of using itch is that it has great analytics. You can see how many views, online plays and downloads each game has on a daily basis and where they were referred from. Most of my referrals do not come from here.
Would a platform with built-in discovery help?
No, for the same reasons listed above. If no one knows that this form of entertainment exists, then why would they go looking for a “platform” that promotes it?
On the creation side: what complexity level do you actually prefer?
This is not a complexity level, but a game style. I go for the third one (Infocom style, a.k.a. text adventures or parser-based IF) because that’s the style of game that I play and that’s the style of game that I write.
For those who’ve finished projects…do you wish you’d kept it simpler?
No. Every game is different. I’ve written everything from a tiny game (written in under 7 hours) to games the size of an Infocom classic, but I wouldn’t change any of them apart from post-comp bug fixes or updates.
There are new choice-based authoring systems/platforms promoted here on a weekly basis. Others may disagree, but I think the last thing we need is yet another one.
After trying parser games for years, then choice-based games, I’ve had the most success with gamebook-style text-based RPGs – an underserved niche, as it turned out. As for promotion: being on itch/io helps; being on IFDB certainly doesn’t hurt, either. But without your own website that you update constantly, you won’t get far. That and treating all these services as communities. Talk to the people you find there. The “social” in social media is the whole point.
It still takes years of persistent work to build up any kind of reputation. There are no shortcuts.
If I may add to this conversation, it would be to suggest that the missing piece isn’t a platform or an authoring engine.
I would suggest cross-pollination might be more effective. Creating things that pull in existing groups and interests and introduce them to the modern IF scene. Whether that be making an ARG-style IF or a disseminated geocaching IF or introducing elements of IF where they typically aren’t, like making a Doom mod with a functioning parser, like a 3D version of the old graphical parsers of the late 80s and early 90s. The point is all of these pull in existing groups that might have adjacent interests or hobbies and introduces them to the genre. When you get a chance, try reading through the welcome thread here and pay attention to how people explain arriving at IF. Many arrive here shortly after a discovery or rediscovery (if they assumed it was dead) of the medium. It’s the simple exposure and discovery that brings most.
In short, I would suggest working to create IF things that might appeal to outside interest as a more practical form of outreach. (Social Democracy comes to mind as a decent case point, or the HHGttG game still bringing new people to the medium all these decades later.)
H2G2 always surprises me. Like, I was drawn in by it, but so many other people as well. Sometimes you don’t know how much your work is going to become popular until it does. Serendipity, I guess.
But I definitely agree: I don’t think it’s so much the platform or engine you do it on.
Personally, the hardest bit is creating a game do people play it. Especially for me, where I like to throw my players straight into the raging ocean and shout “good luck, kid!” - sometimes you need to let the players adjust to the rules of your world (which makes perfect sense once you think about it, but it didn’t to me back then )…
Just thought I’d write a little something here as it kinda relates to the topic. All the games I’ve made end up on itch.io – where they still tend to get some plays, but nothing like the traction you see during IFComp etc. Perhaps 30-40 views per day? Naturally, IF is not the biggest genre on itch!
Anyway, the other day I noticed the views on one of my games (actually, the first one I ever made) had spiked. Like a lot. I was getting around 2k views per day, and the game hadn’t been mentioned anywhere. Itch analytics are fairly basic, but it was showing all views had simply come from itch itself. To my surprise, the game had suddenly found itself at the top of the ‘popular’ list on tags such as ‘puzzle’, ‘casual’ and even ‘web’.
My theory is that itch has been playing around with their algorithm, and my game had accidentally benefited. This carried on for a few days, then it started to drop down the ranks. Then the same thing happened to my most recent game, which hit 3k views yesterday. This translated to around 60+ completions per day – which is impressive for a text-based IF game that can play well over 2hrs.
I’m absolutely sure that the game will drop back down the ‘popularity’ list soon, and things will return to normal. But it just goes to show that IF CAN be popular with a wider audience (who seem genuinely amazed these sorts of games even exist) – as long as they get a little (accidental) promotion.
Naturally, I’ve also made a huge amount of money out of this too. So if anyone has ideas of where I can invest the $4 I’ve made, please let me know.
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