Storyfall’s first game jam is starting in two weeks! Submissions will be open for a month, so you have about 1.5 months from now to submit a story.
We’re opening this up to all genres and there’s no specific theme, you can write about anything you want.
For our first writing contest, we’re going to have cash prizes.
First place: $500.
Second place: $250.
Third place: $100.
Reader’s choice: $50.
If you would like to help judge stories, please reach out (either on this forum, via a support request on Storyfall, or on the Discord).
Note that in addition to being judged on writing quality, coherence, entertainment value, etc. you can also score additional points for utilizing advanced Storyfall features. For instance, using scene and choice effects, global triggers, tags, dynamic choices, sound effects, theming, and other features of Storyfall’s editor will help your submission, as long as usage is appropriate to your story. If your story doesn’t need a specific feature, please don’t feel the need to force it in.
Stories need to not have been published previously (on Storyfall or elsewhere). However if you have a partially written and unpublished story, feel free to finish it and submit it - this can be a good opportunity to finish stories that have been in limbo for a while. I say that as I look at my own growing roster of unfinished stories, haha. (Of course I won’t be submitting to my own competition.)
For the full list of rules please visit the event page. You can also pop into our Discord to discuss the game jam.
I would suggest that you reconsider this rule. I have seen game jams, modding workshops, etc., where there are just a bunch of AI generated cover images. It always defaults to that ugly uncanny valley art style that AI generates too much of and it honestly (at least to me) looks worse than if they were all solid colors.
That may not really be of any importance except I think this is not exactly an uncommon sentiment, at least around here, and you are looking for judges, so potential judges may be put off by this.
That’s a fair point. I guess the question here is whether people are against using AI to generate images in principle, or if they’re against the often generic results that come from that?
If it’s the latter, I think that’s often because people are not putting enough details into their prompts and just using defaults. For instance, for my upcoming sci-fi story I used AI to generate a cover image that’s just the story name, in a font that’s made out of wood.
Since creating even relatively simple art like this is not my strength, generative AI has saved me at least a few hours of fumbling around unfamiliar software. Instead I can focus on writing the actual story, which is the part I enjoy doing.
I suspect I’m not the only writer out there who is either not good at artwork or not inclined towards it, so while I would definitely prefer folks make artwork themselves, I also feel like AI generation here solves a real problem for some people. I’ve not been particularly good at art since I was a kid (I almost failed art class, haha), decades before AI came along.
Yesterday someone in the Discord asked whether they could use AI to polish 3D renderings that they already make themselves. It’s less generative at that point and more like a step in the process. That also seemed fine to me.
Using AI for writing is however not allowed, and I think actually defeats the purpose of creating interactive fiction stories.
i cannot see the cover, but near everyone here is ai-skeptical at best. it doesn’t really matter what your arguments are for it, as similar arguments have been hashed and rehashed out for years on this forum. ths result is the same: we do not want it in our competitions, we want to minimize its usage in the community, and many of us do not want it at all.
I’d say it’s a mix. This forum is pretty staunchly opposed to AI for creative purposes (opinions are more varied on AI for coding help), but for some people that’s because of the ethical concerns (they’re trained on stolen work in order to replace the people whose work they stole), for others it’s because of the quality (low-effort slop makes them not want to interact with these competitions), and for others it’s logistical (if nobody cared enough to write this, why should I care enough to read it?). Or, most commonly, a mix of all three. New generations of AI tools might be able to overcome one of these hurdles, but almost certainly not all three at once.
There’s a tendency in a lot of creative spaces to say “the parts we focus on are the artistry, AI can never replicate that, but everything else is mere technique, it’s fine to use LLMs there”—there’s an anecdote about two different instructors teaching courses on serialized art (comic books, graphic novels, etc), where the art teacher says it’s fine to use AI to do the scripting because there’s no real creativity there, and the writing teacher says it’s fine to use AI to do the drawing for the same reason. But in my opinion, if LLM-generated text defeats the purpose of creating interactive fiction stories (which I wholeheartedly agree with!), then AI cover art does too.
as a comic artist i doubt this anecdote heavily (it’d be like two separate teachers teaching prose and javascript and having that be the “video games course”..) but if it is true, um, what the hell
Yeah, I should say if it’s true at all, it’s probably heavily exaggerated to get the point across. Definitely take it more as a parable than a statement about how comic artists actually work.
I’m still not fully sure why a prohibition on AI cover images is required though. Allowing it doesn’t stop writers who want to create their own art from doing so. If that survey is representative and the majority of people here are opposed to using AI in their stories, then likely the majority of participants will make their own cover image art, which judges would then enjoy seeing.
The rule I wrote that allows usage of AI for cover images is meant to mostly cater to other people like me - writers who like writing but aren’t any good at drawing. Surely I’m not the only one?
I suppose I could also build a tool into Storyfall that allow for making simple cover images from text without using LLMs, perhaps similar to my Driftwood cover image above. You pick from one of several fonts, colors, and styles, and it lets non-artsy writers make a simple text cover image for their story without using AI. I’m not sure how much demand there’d be for something like this?
@Storyfall
I think you just need to abstract between what you said before and what you’re asking now.
If you feel that an IF story’s value (purpose) comes from writing the prose yourself… then why devalue the cover image by letting AI generate it? Many here value artistic skill with a brush, just as much as with a pen… or a guitar pick. Rock on!
Obviously, not everyone is an artist… but what one chooses to do to compensate for that lack of skill says something.
I do like your idea of a cover image construction tool. Have the user cycle through all the fonts with three title panes, (1) lowercase, (2) Capitalized and (3) UPPERCASE. Give them the option (not required though) to upload an image behind the title and use some colour/brightness filters to play with the presentation so it doesn’t distract from the title’s legibility. This has to be purposefully limited though. Too many options and a non-artist will get overwhelmed. Remember, less is more.
I hope you build something like that to stay AI-free from all aspects of the creative process.
On a philosophical level, I worry about using AI as a replacement for lack of skill. If we treat it as such, we will inevitably become less and less capable as a society… as we will stop valuing those who are skilled and the work they produce. Using AI to generate art is no different than handing out participation ribbons. It diminishes acknowledging and recognizing real accomplishment. AI will numb our minds. That is my biggest fear.
I don’t mean to devalue anything - I certainly appreciate human-made art, regardless of how many cover images I generate with AI. If I had a friend who was good at art and willing to help, I’d ask them, but - alas, I have no such options.
Could I get better at art if I invested a lot of time into it? Yeah, maybe. But 1. I recognize what I’m good at and what I’m not good at, and 2. I really have no interest in that. I have a lot of other hobbies that I can scarcely find time for (like learning the Hammered Dulcimer, writing IF fiction, writing a novel, working on Storyfall, etc.). I’d rather go play my instrument in whatever free time I have after the kids have gone to sleep than learn to draw. That’s not to take away from any artists out there who love drawing - I just know myself and what I want to do with my time.
Those are good ideas - and I think I’d like to build that out to give people more options. I’ll add this to my roadmap.
I appreciate everyone’s feedback on AI images. I’m going to keep the rule as-is for this jam, I already have existing users who use AI as part of their art workflows and I don’t want to exclude them. AI generated writing is still not allowed.
@Storyfall
I agree. Definitely don’t change the rules after the competition has begun.
I do appreciate your stance on the writing requirement, and thanks for considering the cover art construction tool.
I found an image on Wikimedia Commons (attribution required) and a free font called Ethnocentric. I used a sharp drop shadow, a solid stroke colour and a gradient fill in SVG for the text. I used a bit of opacity on the image over a dark grey background to make it not compete with the text (the poor man’s desaturation and brightness adjustment). Add some basic scaling and rotation handles to elements and you’re pretty much there.
This image represents the capability of what I think a cover image construction tool should handle. The nice thing about SVG is that it works in the browser at the HTML DOM level so an editor should be pretty straight forward to make. Plus, the title text could be used independently in the story content, as it’s just SVG text. If you ever need some ideas about designing the tool, just reach out.
Just an idea that I think has merit. Like you don’t have enough on your plate already.
There are so many great fonts (that are free to use) that you may want to allow users to simply use their own for game title/logos. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the process, but taking a font file, converting it to WOFF2 (for file compression), then getting the Base64 data string to embed in a custom CSS font-family works very well. Also, the data can be stored in a separate CSS file and the browser will cache the file intelligently (only re-downloading if necessary).
People think making a cover image is a daunting task. It’s not. (I spent 15 minutes looking for a font and an image in that example, and an additional 15 minutes picking colours and tweaking.) It’s just that it’s unfamiliar… and having a tool as simple as “upload an image and a font” will get that trepidation out of the way. Writing a dynamic story is infinitely more difficult.
The non-AI cover image tool is now live! You can select from several fonts (or upload your own), set text and background color, or upload a background image. You can reposition the text (along both axes), blur or sharpen the background image, brighten or darken it, and zoom and reposition the background image too.
Your settings are saved, so if you want to change it you don’t have to start from scratch.
I actually really like the results. This took me about 3 minutes to make (including the time it took me to find a free image).
@HAL9000 curious what you think - you can play around with this in the workshop without having to create an account (just create a story and go to the “Build Cover” button at the bottom).
Here’s my first cover image using the built-in fonts and using a royalty free image. I spent 10 minutes looking for a creepy image and then was happy with one of the fonts you supplied.
This is a very cool tool you’ve made. However, it feels like the UI is designed for mobile because on desktop (1920 x 1200)…
Clicking outside the window closes the editor and erases any progress made.
I had to zoom out a bit in order to see the controls and the image being edited at the same time.
Other than that, I honestly had fun playing around with the background tools. Fun only happens when things go very smoothly, so good job on that.
The custom font upload feature works great too! I’m really impressed.
Here’s a version that could be achieved with text alignment, line breaks and, if SVG is used, a slight narrowing of the text. Things like this allow text to work better with an interesting subject in an image. Something to consider in a future update. I have some more suggestions, but you can always reach out if you’re interested. Or just keep pushing new updates for me to test.
@Storyfall I noticed that your font in “Taken By The Wind” is tripled up. (Looking closely at the tail swoop of the “d”, for example.) Did I miss a feature where you can add multiple pieces of text? How did you achieve that with the tool?
This is much more robust. Before, I could only play with the background. Now I can play with the title a bit so double the fun! I loved that I could adjust the character spacing.
Saving the uploaded font with the build data. You keep the background image for further edits, so keep the uploaded font too.
Line spacing (or line height) adjustment. This is an absolute must with multi-line titles. There were some fonts I wanted to use, but couldn’t because the default line spacing was too much.
Text width. If you’re using SVG, just transform the element’s X axis scale. 50% to 200% is my recommendation. A lot of fonts are narrow and with a wide aspect ratio for the cover image, wider fonts tend to fill up the space better.
I hesitate to add more functionality because if a user wanted more control, they’re thinking like a graphic designer and this isn’t a graphic design tool. This has to stay as bare-bones as possible. I’d be inclined to remove the text rotation slider, to be honest.
Great job again! This is no small feat. I hope the community appreciates what you’re doing and the effort involved. This would make for a great stand-alone tool.
Edit: Tweaked the sample cover image… because I could.
I don’t have the time to participate in this jam but I wanted to say thank you for receiving the request to move away from AI cover images well, and even creating a built-in tool to facilitate original cover image creation.
eta: also thanks to Hal for pushing for it and giving good suggestions
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