Category: mailbag

Mailbag: IF Candidates for Porting

What IF story would be best for someone with limited time and resources to re-create as a 3D and even VR game? It would have to be under some license such as a Creative Commons license, where derivatives are allowed and preferably a license that allows commercial derivatives.

Before I answer this, I feel I’d be doing a disservice if I didn’t ask why you want to attempt this, and whether you’re sure you’ve thought it through.

Text adventures are good at evocative sense of place (and other events) on a budget; at allowing a huge palette of verbs; at geographical exploration and large game spaces; at (if desired) long play times, sometimes extending over months; at capturing a character’s interiority and viewpoint; at creating a very complicated world state that can offer persistent consequences for the player.

VR is good at intense, 10-20 minute experiences. VR works tend towards limited and simple controls, and require intense asset work for every setting. On many (especially budget) VR systems, they induce the least nausea if the protagonist doesn’t move around that much. Meanwhile, IF levels of world state in VR are a pain, because either that state isn’t visible (in which case, how does the player know?) or it is (in which case, you have to make variations on your assets in order to represent those state changes). Cut scenes and branching narrative outcomes, also cheap(ish) in text, may be very expensive in VR in that they may require animations or additional assets.

Not only that, but any game with a complex parser-based experience is going to be untenable: no one wants to type in VR; you could hook up voice-recognition but it’s likely to multiply the parser errors that are already irritating on the screen ordinarily. There are lots of great one-room IF games, from Rematch to Aisle, that rely heavily on the inventiveness of the player’s input. These would also be a poor match for VR in most instances.

Some similar things are true of 3D games in general, though less so. In a text adventure, you can write a randomized “[The character] is [one of]whistling a jaunty tune[or]staring out the window[or]playing solitaire[at random]” sentence, and you’ve just accomplished something that would take days of idle animation work in 3D.

So that raises the question of what you’re hoping to get by adapting a text game to a very much non-text medium, and whether it wouldn’t make more sense to come up with a new story suited to the affordances of your target medium. The best piece of advice I can offer here is just “don’t do this.” VR is really, really very much its own beast and even 3D console gameplay doesn’t always map at all well to that space.

But, okay. Let’s say that for some reason you don’t want to take the easier route and write a story customized to the storytelling possibilities of VR. What would be the least-awful IF game to port to VR, given minimal development resources?

Continue reading “Mailbag: IF Candidates for Porting”

Mailbag: IF Infrastructure From Scratch

I reached out to you a while ago to ask about your consultation services / fees and you told me that you weren’t taking on any new clients.  I respect that.  I was hoping you might “mailbag” my question or maybe have a little advice off the top of your head.  Any help would be greatly appreciated!  I posted this on the IntFiction forums as well and just hoping to get a little bit of your expertise / feedback.

I am working on a CYOA sandbox visual novel project. My buddy wrote a framework in C# / Unity and I’m currently writing the story in OneNote / Scrivener with articy:draft doing a lot of the node-work / structural organization. I used SimpleMind to do some high-level mapping for the sandbox but it’s been very clunky. I reverted to using Excel so I could bring direct mathematical tests into my work for planning and it’s been really tough to combine the cell-based organizational structure with blocks of text.

Creatively – I don’t write well in little bubbles…at all. I prefer writing in a Word / WordPerfect / Scrivener / Notepad setting. It’s easiest for me to see all the text, re-read what I need to, edit, etc. I’m at a point where the story is getting difficult to test / debug / and translate into Unity. At the end of the day – whatever tools I use – I have to be able to hand my work over to the developer and make sure he understands everything in as neat / concise a manner a possible.

Here’s an example of some of my code:

\INSTRUCTION((ONCLICK.CELLPHONE)(=)(0)) // sets the variable that counts the number of clicks to zero – variable declaration

\EVENT((CELLPHONE)(ONCLICK))

     \INSTRUCTION((ONCLICK.CELLPHONE)(+)(1)) // adds 1 to the counter variable

     \CONDITIONTEST((ONCLICK.CELLPHONE)(=)(1)) // tests the counter variable – boolean (true / false)

          \TRUE

               \ITEMDESCRIPTION((CELLPHONE)(ONCLICK)(This is your cell phone)) // cell phone description on the first click

          /TRUE

          \FALSE

               \CONDITIONTEST((ONCLICK.CELLPHONE)(=)(2)) // cell phone description on the second click

                    \TRUE

                         \ITEMDESCRIPTION((CELLPHONE)(ONCLICK)(This is STILL your cell phone))

                    /TRUE

                /CONDITIONTEST((ONCLICK.CELLPHONE)(=)(2))

                \CONDITIONTEST((ONCLICK.CELLPHONE)(>)(2)) // cell phone description on every click after second

                      \TRUE

                           \ITEMDESCRIPTION((CELLPHONE)(ONCLICK)(Why do you keep checking your cell phone?))

                      /TRUE

                 /CONDITIONTEST((ONCLICK.CELLPHONE)(>)(2))

          /FALSE

     /CONDITIONTEST((ONCLICK.CELLPHONE)(=)(1))

/EVENT((CELLPHONE)(ONCLICK))

The bottom line: Some of what I do is creative writing – storytelling, dialogue, and narration / item / entity descriptions, etc. And the other part of what I do is basically writing the instructions to the developer so he knows when to call which functions and how the visual novel is basically supposed to operate. Does that make sense? It’s super time-consuming because I have to partition portions of my mind to work on the tasks separately. My biggest hurdle to overcome is finding a medium in which to do this. I can’t write everything in Unity because I don’t know the C# code and that’s really what my buddy is there for. I’d write everything in Scrivener but I need the math functionality.

Continue reading “Mailbag: IF Infrastructure From Scratch”

Mailbag: QBN System Variants

Hello Emily,

I was reading through your blog and, in your post dated May 25, 2017 you describe several narrative systems, and the last one you write about you name it “System with Dynamic Requirements”

I’ve been working for a couple years now (on my free time) on a system that is very similar to what you describe: A tool to create narrative very similar to the way QBN does but with dynamic requirements for actors and locations.

The main difference is that it is a system to run over a real time game and the choices are done by gameplay inputs instead of selecting or letting the game select.

The tool provides a visual-node interface to create attributes and rules. The player actions trigger events on the system (i.e. looting a body trigger and event and we can create a rule on the tool that say “when loot event is triggered add attribute looter to the player”) and the attributes are evaluated continuously by the rules and giving results (i.e. If player have looter attribute with a value higher than 5 add world attribute “looter missions activated”)

Of course, there are the dynamic requirements that I’m using as I think the player’s engagement will be higher if the characters used on the story are people they “choose” to met in the game instead of previously designed so I can check if at one point they helped someone to escape or to acquire some item or whatever and later check the list of actors and use that one to be part of the story, or I can check between the locations in the world and create a mission that use a location with a certain attributes instead of always the same location for the same mission.

My question is: Do you know about other projects working on the same line?

Sort of, depending on how precisely you define “the same line”.

I know of projects that make use of Node-RED to visually define rules for various purposes other than interactive narrative rules.

I know of IF games, including my own, that allow the player to unlock new gameplay and story sections with any item that matches some general requirement; and sometimes a puzzle will have multiple solutions, but the specific solution the player picks turns out to be important or expressive in some way, or is used to judge the protagonist’s character.

I know of experiments with dynamically-gated story elements — most (but not all) of these tools in the academic space rather than among hobbyist IF tools or (for that matter) commercial video game tools. You may be interested in Ian Horswill’s Dear Leader’s Happy Story Time, described here in an academic paper with references and mentions of other related academic projects, or here in a video talk. (The references here provide a lot of potential further searches, with context.)

I know of realtime games that serve up specific beats depending on what tags are currently matched about world state. See Elan Ruskin’s work for Left4Dead, covered in this excellent talk. This is salience-based matching for various world states, which then in turn influenced the design of the dialogue-fitting in Firewatch. Not the same as constraint solving, but relevant to some of your other points about wanting to unlock specific story beats if the player has the right background.

I do not know of an existing tool with all the features you describe: a visual interface to create the rules for a dynamic-conditions interactive narrative system, applied to a realtime experience. (That’s not to say no one’s building one. I just haven’t seen it.)

That said, I’d like to suggest that you’re opening not just a technical space but a challenging design space, and you’ll want to test your assumptions about the player experience. There are some finished, public examples of games that do play a little in this space. For instance, games in the Fable series assigned story importance to figures the player had spent time with. I would suggest, based on my experience with that, that your initial assumption (“the player’s engagement will be higher if the characters used on the story are people they “choose” to met in the game instead of previously designed”) may not be true in all cases.

 

Mailbag: Writing Commercial IF for Mobile Devices

Dear Emily,

I am a professional writer–22 years plus of making my living from my pen–who is just now sticking my toes into the world of IF… I recently had a chance to revisit the world of IF in drawing up a planned project for a grant proposal. It’s been many years since I’ve played in this world, and it’s changed monumentally. Your blog has been tremendously helpful in giving me an overview.

I haven’t yet, however, come across an entry from you where you really get into the nuts and bolts of which engine you consider the best for independent writers hoping to create a commercially successful game as a  phone app.

Like a lot of newbies to this form, I don’t come from a programming background, and have little facility with coding. After trying Adrift and Inklekwriter, along with a couple of others, I settled on Quest, but I’m finding the lack of a GUI and the amounts of coding that are expected pretty daunting.

Before I jump down yet another half-dozen rabbit holes to try to find the best solution for me, I thought I’d ask you. What, right now, November 2017, would you recommend as the best IF engine for creating content for a phone-based app, that would work best for experienced writers with little coding experience?

*

So the short answer to this is: I don’t know of any solution that requires no programming or technical savvy, but that will let you write free-concept, text-only IF and sell it on mobile, with reasonable odds of making money, and without going through anyone else’s platform.

“Commercially successful” does introduce technical requirements, because that does imply that you’re going to need attractive, non-generic screenshots, and that it has to be an app; merely being able to play the resulting IF on a phone, e.g. as browser-based IF, is not enough to meet the asker’s criteria.

Furthermore, most genuinely commercially successful IF has the advantage of an experienced studio putting it together (Big Fish’s Lifeline series, Choices), a really attractive front end/additional gameplay (inkle’s stuff), and/or a brand concept that has been developed with a bunch of titles over time (Choice of Games, Episode, Choices again).

Also, I consider “commercially successful parser” to be such a hard target that I’m not covering it here. And it’s harder to get solid results out of a parser game unless you’re willing to code more. So I think we can rule that out.

However, there are a few approaches that I consider currently realistic, given the right combination of circumstances.

Continue reading “Mailbag: Writing Commercial IF for Mobile Devices”

Mailbag: Developing an audience

I know IF is hard to sell, but I’d appreciate it if you could give any advice on how to find my audience. I want to learn more about game promotion. I’m not familiar with the IF community, so I don’t know how to reach them. And well, my goal is to expand beyond the IF community, too, so perhaps you have any thoughts on the subject. 

The IF community used to be a pretty cohesive group with a few well-defined venues for interaction. You could be good or bad at making a splash in those places, but at least there were specific places to go.

That is no longer the case. There are lots of subgroups of people who write and play interactive fiction who don’t speak to one another much and who are basically unaware of one another. People who like traditional parser IF are probably hanging out in the intfiction forum, people who like ChoiceScript are on the Choice of Games forum, classic gamebook aficionados are somewhere else, and people writing Twine are all over the place. Different language communities have their own locations.

So putting your game on IFDB, announcing it on the intfiction forum, etc., are still good things to do — and an IFDB entry is mandatory if you want to be in contention for a XYZZY award. You can meet other IF authors on the euphoria channel, which is often a good way to garner some informal feedback. And there’s a fair amount of activity on Twitter, too — always an especially ephemeral and challenging way to network.

Competitions are another way to get some eyes on your game, including most notably IF Comp, now running. Sometimes, placing well in IF Comp leads to job offers from commercial IF publishers, and over time, a good standing in this context can build you a (localized) reputation. On the other hand, IF Comp‘s 79 entries this year mean that you’re swimming in a bigger sea than ever.

All of this is very much a retail kind of process, one that may get you a few dozen mentions on people’s blogs and some feedback from individual fans.

If what you want is to build the kind of profile that would allow you to do major crowdfunding projects or sell your IF online in the future — if you want this as a stepping stone, not just to being hired as a contributor, but to having your own creative brand — then it’s likely not enough.

At that point, you probably need to behave like an indie game developer. Figure out what games resemble yours, and how those games are being presented, where. Participate in those conversations, wherever they’re taking place. Consider taking part in some game jams and going to some meetups, so that you build a network of people who are also working in your sub-niche and can help boost you. Perhaps develop an itch.io portfolio. Look at submitting your game to indie game festivals and expo booths that are open to IF, from WordPlay to IndieCade to AdventureX. Look into whether you can/want to do public playthroughs or readings from your work, at a local IF meetup or as part of something literary-themed.

There are a handful of Steam curators that specifically curate IF, too, so if you have a game on Steam, it might be worth knowing about the Choice of Games curation list. Less IF-focused but still of possible interest: Choice and Consequence.

Another useful move is to write about or otherwise engage with other people’s interactive narrative work, and make yourself part of the conversation.

There’s a ton of advice online about how to do indie game promotion, so I’m not going to try to offer a full list of resources here — impossible! But the GDC Vault contains lots of past talks from the Indie Games summit, some of which are now free to watch. Also, presskit() is cool and Rami Ismail is an inspiration. [ETA: I’ve been told the indie games content is all free. Bonanza!]

Mailbag: Choice of Aesthetics

A while back, you alluded to the aesthetic preferences cultivated by Choice Of Games and their writers.  Is this written down or codified somewhere?  Is there a critical discussion?   Have you written about it?

There’s a lot of advice and material codified for people who are actually working for them, on their website. An obvious starting point would be their three-part series about how they judge good games: 1 2 3

It’s also probably worth looking at their ideas about structure, which covers branch-and-bottleneck (or what they call “stack of bushes”) design, delayed consequence, and stats deployment. Endgames specifically are covered in this post.

Sam Ashwell’s review of Cannonfire Concerto talks about how that work does/does not align with Choice of norms, and there are a few other (admittedly fairly offhand) observations in his review of Hollywood Visionary.

Overall, I’d characterize their preferences like this:

  • a highly customizable protagonist who at a bare minimum can be any gender and romance any gender, but who might also embody many other possible variations
  • a tendency towards bildungsroman, so that the protagonist’s definition can be incorporated into the storytelling, and because the whole brand was inspired by the game Alter Ego; many of their works start with an education and training period
  • less focus on prose style: their structure allows for more verbose writing between choices than inkle or Failbetter, and the undercharacterization of protagonists often precludes using a strong narrative viewpoint
  • an emphasis on plot consequence (you did this and as a result the company failed) over internal or emotional consequence
  • a tendency (though not an absolute rule) in favor of interchangeable characters
  • riffing on core conventions of existing genres (though this is something where they’ve matured over the years, I think — but early pieces sometimes felt focused on “what if we took this standard trope set and then explored the consequence trees possible within it”)