Would that be compatible with the likes of Vorple, though?
Vorple specifically requires a local server, to get around XSS restrictions, but it’s the outlier here—and I’m not sure it can be built into an Electron app either? I haven’t used it much.
Nothing in Vorple is inherently incompatible with being bundled into a single HTML file. It’s just a lot of work to work out all the kinks.
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If you’re building something that can run in a web browser, then it’s relatively easy to throw your webpage into an app wrapper made with React Native or Flutter. Your game doesn’t need to use React or Dart to run in a webview. I won’t go so far as to say it’s trivial, because there is some learning curve to get started with those tools – but you can start with an empty project template, and adding a single webview with bundled assets is just about the easiest thing you can do with them (said from experience). I believe that either platform will give you an app bundle starting at around 25MB, before adding in your own assets.
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Me too. Counterfeit Monkey.gblorb is 10.8 MiB, and even 1893.gam is 67.6 MiB.
Smaller than a minimal Electron app, and cross-platform. You can run those on anything but an iPhone.
It’s as trivial as delivering a song or a video. People understand that you play song files in an app; it’s not hard to explain that you play story files in an app.
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I’m not sure people do understand files, outside the the context of specific workflows they’ve been trained in.
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While I can totally believe there are people using computers who don’t understand files or can’t extend you open an image file in an image viewer, a audio/video file in a media player, a document file in an appropriate document viewer/editor to you run a story file in an appropriate interpreter, I find it hard to believe that the group who lack that basic understanding of how computers work and the group who understands how to play parser IF has a significant overlap… heck, I suspect the venn diagram is two non-touching circles.
Also, with how retro this genre is, I’d expect most people with a strong interest in IF to at least be somewhat familiar with the idea of using an emulator to run a rom, which is very similiar to what we do with story files and interpreters, except we’re emulating hardware that never actually existed and have been doing so since the days before PC became synonymous with x86 machines.
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I think this will be a major hot take since interactive fiction is text based I t feel like the writing needs to be way higher quality than typical video game writing . The problem is it often isn’t which is partially why this genre isn’t as popular. Also alot of times it feels like I’m reading a novel disguised as a game . It doesn’t help that a lot of times the characters aren’t fleshed out or three dimensional at all .
Also I feel like visual novels are a better representation of choose your own adventure genre than fully text based games. They are significantly more interactive and unlike text based games the good ones have three dimensional characters and amazing stories. Also the art work and music can sometimes carry them mean while text based has to be carried on writing alone and a good portion of writers skills just aren’t at the level where it needs to be to do that by themselves .
Fallen London is among the the best in this genre but it’s grindy aspects are annoying as hell and it’s telling that if it wasn’t do grindy it would lost most of its players by now because they would run out of content.
In the visual novel side Sir Brante , Fate/stay night and there is like so many choose to from.
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Welcome to the forum!
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As someone who writes about both visual novels and interactive fiction, I’m inclined to disagree. Visual novels have in fact been decreasing its “interactivity” in order to be fully fledged “novel games” or masking its lack of interactivity through gameplay elements.
Of the two examples you’ve provided, I agree that Sir Brante has excellent choice systems because it’s simulating the stages of life and the small incremental choices that will affect someone’s life. But Fate/stay Night is a strange inclusion as much as I love the game: it follows what Sam Kabo Ashwell calls a gauntlet structure where bad ends branch off the normal path. Players are going to choose the bad end to see where the scenario goes off the rails. It’s not exactly interactivity in the way Sir Brante is.
I guess this is truly a hot take since it just baffles me.
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Yeah, first truly hot take I’ve seen in this thread in a while.
And, for the record, we really don’t care that our niche isn’t very popular.
Just curious, what text-only interactive fiction have you played (we do typically classify visual novels as interactive fiction)? There are “like so many choose to from” for interactive fiction, too, and many of them have beautiful writing and are not “grindy”.
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I’ve played suzerain , sir brante ,roadwarden , fallen London and have tried a few choices of games demos . higurashi ( I don’t know if higurashi counts as interactive ), I played alot of Japanese visual novels . I think visual novels were my introduction to text based fiction .
So it’s like I consider it something Japan created because I only discovered western works this year literally .
I feel like I’m basing this on the choice of games hosted games I played a lot of them feel like novels that would never gotten published as a novel with only slight choices .
It doesn’t help that a lot of times no matter how outrageous the choice it do railroad it always ends in the same result . For visual novels while I like fate/stay night yeah that a bad example a better one would been Our Life LGBT love story with lots of choices and variety of endings .
I mean this is a hot take thread no need to combative . Also obviously some ppl do because they are trying to make money in this space .
I even pointed out some of the criticisms I see about text based interactive games i see on steam. Alot of them feel like novels not very good ones at that disguised as games .
This is the forum for people who aren’t trying to make money in this space.
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I’m not being combative; sorry if it came off that way.
97% of the almost 15,000 games here are free to play.
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See I only discovered that recently my exposure to interactive fiction is the itch.io games and choice of games genre games . I like the idea behind choice of games but the actual games leave alot to be desired .
Oh they let you choose to be gay, black, etc but it never matters . Half the time when I choose male especially on certain romance games it feels as if the character was written as woman than all they did is change the pronouns . One of their popular games in particular feels this way. To be fair they have a lot of games that does this in reverse .
Don’t get me started on the personality aspects it’s like you get so much choices but it never matters or this like a narrative dissonance between the personality I chose to play and the options we are given . This happen a lot in regular video games but you think a text based game would be better about this and alot are not because they are too busy trying to tell a linear almost novel like story but give us players the illusion of choice .
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My understanding is that Choice of Games is quite self-aware about having a specific “house style” that their audience expects & that they expect writers to conform to. So that style should really be understood as being characteristic of Choice of Games, rather than IF more broadly.
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Well that truly is a hot take. Please allow me to introduce you to Sturgeon’s Law. If interactive fiction is a tiny niche, that’s largely because popular technology has moved on from this kind of game, leaving a community of passionate individuals creating the very best work they can. If some of the work isn’t as good as other work, it’s not from lack of trying. Sturgeon’s Law applies equally well to modern big budget games produced by teams of hundreds of people. Some of it is good; some of it is less good.
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That’s why a lot of their official games all feel the same .I do see that the hosted ones have a little more variety.
The one game I posted with regards to gender choice the author admitted she initially wanted to publish the story as a young adult novel . After finding that out it made me look at the story differently . I suspect a few of the games were initially novels that couldn’t get published .
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