Tumblr Interactive Fiction Collation

I’ve been attempting to muck around with Sugarcube for the first time, which involves a lot of confused search queries and increasingly desperate attempts at figuring out what kind of questions to even ask to get answers, with the documentation pulled up and several random blogs or old threads. Good time.

While attempting to figure out what you could do to the sidebar in Sugarcube, I ran across a Tumblr post that had a question sent in asking about recommendations about similar blogs- and to my surprise, found a bunch of interactive fiction projects and makers I’d never heard about here. I imagine most of them are choice based, as much of the overlap seems to be with the general writing community on Tumblr who lean that way, but I thought I’d link the post for people who are curious about what’s going on over yonder.

Interestingly, a lot of the promotion or development blogs for IF pieces there are styled in a way I associate with the larger literate (so, long form prose, not texting or chat speak) roleplay groups that had a big hey day a few years back. Lots of emphasis on graphics and aesthetics and tidy organization.

EDIT TO ADD: Have briefly flicked through some of their posts/blogs. Some of these projects have a startling amount of words- one mentioned 100,000 in a chapter update. Lots of Twine, which I expected.

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Tumblr has a pretty thriving IF community, of which I’m a peripheral part.

One of the bigger “hub” blogs is https://interact-if.tumblr.com/. They also have a discord, and ran a game jam earlier this year. Most of the tumblr-popular games tend to be dating sims in a style that’s Choice of Games-adjacent, with influences from otome/visual novels (but with more gender choices). And yes, they tend to be very long and not (yet) completed. Wayfarer, for example, is probably the longest twine game ever in terms of word count, and it’s only at its first chapter.

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Fascinating. It’s so interesting to find out about communities that’ve been hiding on the edges of your radar. I actually recognize one of the detective games in that jam just from showing up in the interactive fiction filter on itch.io a bunch!

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Yes, most of the choice-based IF community is concentrated on tumblr, whether it’s Twine, Ink, ChoiceScript or whatnot.

Edit: Wayfarer authour has an amazing list of posts teaching SugarCube.

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can confirm @magiciansvoyage is awesome and writes good games. their current one is really neat and has a playable demo i think

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