A little while back I did an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun which included, among other things, a question about what I thought of inklewriter, the branching narrative tool from inkle studios. That interview was published in a funky CYOA format, which was cool, but it means that it’s hard for me to point people … Continue reading “Choice-based Narrative Tools: inklewriter”
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”
The Night Circus is a new game by Failbetter, the creators of Echo Bazaar, set in the fictional world of the forthcoming book of the same name by Erin Morgenstern. (I should say as a disclaimer, before I go any further, that I’m not a completely disinterested party — I’ve worked with Failbetter several times … Continue reading “The Night Circus”
…or: What does it mean to be writing interactive fiction? When asked about outreach prospects for IF at PAX East, I said this: We have a two-part accessibility problem. One part is the interpreter: people don’t want to download separate files and don’t want to have to figure out file formats. That structure is unattractive … Continue reading “So, Do We Need This Parser Thing Anyway?”
Choosing a Tool One of the first decisions you’ll need to make before you do serious work on your own piece of interactive fiction is what tools you will use to create it. While you could create IF in a general purpose programming language, most people choose to use a language or design system specially … Continue reading “Writing IF”
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 