My wife and I have been obsessively playing the Spelling Bee every day lately, and that’s attributed to a human curator/designer. It seems like a thing that could be made purely algorithmically, but I assume there are certain ineffable qualities to the word choices that are non-obvious to me.
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Yeah, it’s not entirely devoid of IF games, though a lot of them are Flash and now inaccessible. I played You Find Yourself in a Room there many, many years ago, but don’t know why there isn’t more modern IF.
I have to admit that’s funny. Though a bad look for the website in question. [Transcription of the screenshot Ivan posted: It’s a card for a user-created AI scenario that you can play through, titled “Gym”, created by one “Wallter Whitee”. The description of “Gym” is: “Its about a gym big booty latina she has had many booty seguries and boobs serguries she has a small whaist and is blonde blue eyes.” The goal of the scenario is: “Fuck here”. The scenario has 6 plays, no reviews, and a 0% clear rate.]
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Why do newspapers not publish interactive fiction?
Because their crosswords would go to war with their narratives. </bad-joke>
The image of IF-as-crosswords does set interesting images in my head—how would IF culture differ if it was centred on series of regularly released short but cryptic games by pseudonymous setters?—and at the same time sounds very future of the 80s; one can just imagine some poor soul speculating about someone, in the far off future of the 1990s, removing a floppy disk from their newspaper to play the latest Cryptic Adventure.
Or—to turn back to ye olde browser games as a source of inspiration here—escape-the-room games, anyone?
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I have been thinking of a site for braille penpals. One of the ideas is a serial text adventure delivered in braille by mail with responses and moves from the player delivered by return mail. ???
PS. My work with braille would be gratis, no interest in monetizing.
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I like that. Since popular culture already understands that concept, you’re already halfway to acceptance. A Daily Escape Room seems like an easy sell. “You succeeded in x moves!”
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Actually, they seemingly have a workaround for that: https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player
I haven’t tried it recently, but it worked last time I had occasion to, which was a couple years ago.
Edited to add: it also seems like they’ve found a way to make at least some old flash games run right in the browser, no download or tinkering required by the end user, using an emulator called Ruffle. I don’t know if that has been extended to all of the games, but when I quickly tried it just now, all the ones I tried were running just fine in the browser thanks to this.
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Not sure about the monetization part or whether it works as a “daily challenge,” but I would be interested, from a creative perspective, in a platform that was more friendly to micro-IF games. I’ve been trying (well, wanting at least) to get into making a lot of small IF games, and even made myself a little blog thingy to facilitate this, but it’s hard to feel motivated to finish these things when there’s no clear platform to actually share them with players.
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Off-topic, but these were all quite good. I found the meta dialogue about being a fictional stand-in for the Hindenburg in one of them quite amusing.
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Speaking as a former Flash developer, I can say also that Flash never entirely went away. Though the .swf file format was retired, Adobe Flash became Adobe Animate, which relied on Grant Skinner’s Create.js library to export to HTML5 code that runs in an HTML Canvas element. Animate is still around and Create.js still works fine, so in one very real sense it’s still entirely possible to make new Flash games. It’s even possible to open old Flash files in Animate and convert them to HTML5, though I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of those old games were lacking their original source files or the will to convert them, which is why Newground has them running in an emulator.
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There are a lot of text based mobile games but all the ones that are popular typically have art , a choice system and some actual game play mechanics . It’s interesting they have found creative ways to implement combat . Several of the ones I’ve discovered on android use turn based combat, they also have multi player modes ( this is big ) and are very accessible ( someone who is blind , deaf , or some form of disabled can still fully play these games ) .
Most of them seem to be dungeon /rougelike or open world rpg games . There is a ton of massive ones that have micro transactions and usually have very good looking male/female characters .
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Anyone else imagining something along the lines of an interactive comic strip or 4koma?
Also, I had no idea New Grounds was still a thing and figured it went down when Flash Player was discontinued if not before… nice to hear Flash games have been saved from the scrap heap of… I suppose something isn’t really lost media if their are extant copies available, but I’m not sure we really have a term for media that is out of reach not because copies are rare, but because we have no means of playing the copies we have and I don’t want to call such inaccessible because to me, inaccessible means the media isn’t properly enjoyable by those with disabilities.
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Like A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric or its Flash-based predecessors (which really count as IF as well IMO—the central mechanic behind those reminds me of The Ballroom)?
I suppose that would work, albeit it’d be farther afield from normal IF than one would expect.
The idea of webcomics-that-are-also-IF also begs to be combined with other forms of reader interactivity, so I suppose monetising increased tiers of influence over the story might also make sense…
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Continuing to think about this and it strikes me that Fallen London uses the steady drip / drug addiction model, while the NYT games are drop-in / walk-away. I think the fact that you can drop in any time, only commit a small portion of your day and then be done, is a selling point for the kind of casual gamers who play those.
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Would this also suggest that such IF games would need to be designed around a single core mechanic which could provide bountiful puzzles, rather than each game varying mechanics and so on?
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Well, you know, we’re just spitballing crazy ideas here, and you don’t want to draw too small of a box… but yeah, having some kind of reliable, repeatable mechanic sounds like it would be the most attractive thing for daily visitors, so they know what they’re in for every day. Going back to your escape room suggestion (whether you meant that seriously or tongue-in-cheek), if you had a daily escape room, I guess you’d have to carry a clear set of rules through each game, and maybe some universal items.
Thinking about Fallen London again - I was hooked for a while but haven’t actually played in a long time - I guess their basic mechanic is very simple, no? I’m also recalling another sort-of-narrative-based card game on iOS called Reigns, that I also haven’t played in a long time, but which was an interesting way to tell a small story, that seemed like it could be indefinitely extended with new card sets.
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It’s probably not the review culture, since this community really values detailed, constructive reviews which the all-or-none Itch culture is fundamentally different from.
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Makes sense. It’d have to be a well-chosen set for both rules and items…
At the very least it spawned a fair amount of spin-offs sequels (apparently)? Which means there’s something to be said for building strongly on one simple mechanic.
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They actually did a sequel to reigns called her majesty and then another sequel a game of thrones version . In both versions they extended the concept alot and added more game play.
Their is another text based card game called sultan game it’s a Chinese game and it’s very interesting . It takes the concept from 1001 Arabian nights and you have to entertain this depraved sultan . The game pushes the limits of depravity .
Only bad thing is translation issues it feels like it was translated by a.i instead of a human . Hopefully that fixed soon the game has sold pretty well
“Interactive webcomic” was kinda my intention for a main use case of Poink-and-Clink.
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New grounds is still around but no where near as popular as it was in its heyday . It’s interesting seeing the flash based games and animations on there and kongregate game some of them no longer work . Others some how were preserved .