As mentioned in a previous post, Varytale is a platform for interactive stories. It’s put together by Ian Millington, the same person who created the Undum tool, but Varytale goes quite a bit further. Writing Tools Undum provides a slick front-end and a way to build a few choices and otherwise leaves everything up to … Continue reading “Writing for Varytale”
So Bee has been out for a couple of days now in reader beta, and my analytics page overflows. The Varytale system includes a mechanism by which readers can rate and comment on any individual piece of the story as they go along, giving a one to five star ranking and displaying the average of … Continue reading “Varytale Analytics”
Varytale is a platform for interactive stories that fall somewhere on the spectrum between stateful CYOA (like Choice of Games) and quality-based narrative (like Echo Bazaar). As you can see from the screenshot, the experience is intentionally booklike and lushly textured. Varytale borrows or improves on the attractive qualities of Undum. There are visible stats … Continue reading “Bee out in Varytale Reader’s Beta”
For those who are interested in the behind-the-scenes details of Varytale, their blog has several detailed new posts, with screenshots.
A couple days ago I mentioned the rerelease of my game Bee, and promised a follow-up article about some of the technical aspects. The Project Key things to know about the game: You can also play the new Dendry version here. The Challenge Bee was written for Varytale, but that platform went away a long … Continue reading “Rebalancing Bee”
Bee is a choice-based story I wrote some years ago about being a homeschooled student trying (but failing) to win the national spelling bee. Initially released for Varytale in 2012, Bee went off-line for a time when the platform shut down. Varytale’s programmer, Ian Millington, then partially re-created Bee for Dendry, a non-commercial platform with similar technical … Continue reading “Bee Republished”
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 