This is a list of text-based IF’s that I and another user on itch.io, xSai or Saikotic, made on itch.io and I thought I’ll share this with you guys here since you might be interested. All the credit goes to xSai for coming up with the idea. Also, note that, neither I nor xSai own the rights to any of these IF’s; we are just recommending them to people as we think they deserve more recognition and some people might actually end up enjoying some of them. The list was made on itch.io and so, unfortunately, will have to be accessed from there for anyone wanting to access them from here. The list also had to be split into seperate parts as we ran out of characters to use. Almost all of the IF’s are made in Twine, with a few being made in Ren’py or some other engine. All the IF’s are completely text-based, a few using some visuals and/or images, but none of them are full Visual Novels. A lot of the IF’s are also unfinished WIPs; some of them are already completed, close to completion, or just started. We will continue to keep updating the list as we find more IF’s. We also have a discord server dedicated just for this. If you or anyone else have any IF’s you want to recommend, feel free to share them here, on the dedicated itch.io page, or on the discord server (They have to be text-based IF’s from itch.io and need to have at least some kind of interactivity. IF’s from other sites, visual novels or some other type of game will not be accepted). Or if you just want to talk or ask me for some suggestions on which IF’s to try, then feel free to do that as well. Anyway, thank you and I hope you have a good day. Part 1 of the list:
Am I correct that this is a long list of twine games which are a) unfinished and where one may b) choose the PC to be a number of different characters? I can’t help wondering whether there is more to this than correlation.
I haven’t checked this list specifically, but I’ve played other recommended twine games on itch, and I think the culture there is ‘WIP’ culture where you post the first few chapters and try to get fans who follow along and participate in guiding the future chapters. Choice of games does this too, and it seems to lend itself to larger fanbases; most of the posts on the CoG forums are on WIP threads.
And sure enough many great novels were originally published chapter for chapter in newspapers. Practically all of those we still remember got finished, eventually. As for the rest: hoi polloi.
One way of increasing the chances of ever finishing a twine game - as you know - is to keep the combinatorial explosion under control…
Itch actually has a pretty good tagging and search system to filter to specific games.
If you’re a creator, you can actually see the tag-cloud people used to find your game. It pays to tag your games intelligently, because that is how a lot of people find them. Especially if you have niche elements like “character customization” or “dating sim” or “erotic”. Definitely don’t forget to tag “interactive fiction” and your game’s genre(s).
If your game is missing tags, I assume it only shows up on a title or author search, or potentially from words in the description (which is matching text and not category tags.)
This is the from the dashboard of Going Down. I can click these URLs and see that combination of tags and where my project shows up in that search.
WIP games are common on itch. Many are seeking funding or just gauging interest in a prototype or pre-release status. You can mark a game separately “public” so it’s visible in search and “in-development”.
My list of followers is longer than that. Actually, I find the best way to find authors of IF on itch.io is to follow all the IF-related game jams and competitions, specifically all the Adventuron game jams, text adventure literacy jams, ParserComp, ECTOCOMP, PunyComp and so on. These are all finished games, not WIP. In this way, you can also see how the games rated in the jams. But don’t just play the winning games, as the games rated 5th or 6th are sometimes better than the winners because of the vagaries of public voting. Maybe play the top 50% in each jam.
