So you want to create an interactive story

[alias_sqbr]

Who knew this was going to be a series?
Some preliminary thoughts about interactive stories
Notes for Interactive Storytelling panel

There are a lot of tools and communities depending on what you're into. I have not tried all of these personally, and am largely summarising Choice-based Narrative Tools: inklewriter (and there are even more in her sidebar). The only ones I've tried personally are StoryNexus and Ren'py.

Gamebook eg Choose Your Own Adventure: Text editor :D

Visual Novels:
Ren'py The structure tends to be branches + stats. Some of the "text" tools do allow images and music, but Ren'py is the only one I know of that is designed specifically for games that use them.

Popular tools for making Text Adventures (not sure how they fit into the categories below):
Inform 7 Powerful tool for creating downloadable text based games. Has a very large community.
Twine Less powerful afaict but produces a webpage.

Qualities/storylets (repeated little quests that change over time based on stats):
Varytale (in closed beta)
StoryNexus I found this pretty easy to get started with but unsuited to my writing style. Allows a small amount of image/style customisation.

RPG-esque branches plus stats:
ChoiceScript Hard to use but powerful?
Undum
Inklewriter Not very powerful but easy to use, apparently.

AI:
Versu Characters are all simple AIs which interact in organic ways. Developer tools not released yet but it looks interesting! EDIT: Now defunct :(

Comments

[havocthecat]

I've actually been thinking of downloading ChoiceScript or going over to the StoryNexus site and trying to use it for some roleplaying-esque CYOA activities.

[alias_sqbr]

Ooh! Good luck! I downloaded twine yesterday and stared at the screen for a few minutes before deciding I would just do the story idea linearly. Which i guess did at least inspire me to write :)

[pedanther]

I've played around with Inform 7 a bit, though not enough to compare it knowledgably to other languages.

One of the interesting aspects is that it's designed so you can specify the game using actual sentences, like "The Library is a room. In the Library is a book." -- in fact that there is a grammatically-complete, compilable game in I7, though admittedly a very short and rather boring one, with no endings.

Also I seem to vaguely recall that I7's distribution builder is capable of doing webpages as one of its options these days.


When I was last giving a lot of attention to the text adventure community (which was before Twine was really a thing), the main alternatives to Inform were TADS, Hugo, and ADRIFT. TADS is powerful, and has resulted in some really nice games, but is definitely a programming language, the kind best left to people who don't mind having to remember the difference between "x = 1" and "x := 1". The other two I don't have any experience of.

[alias_sqbr]

That is interesting! And thanks for the extra info. Will I see you at the panel? :)

[pedanther]

I hope so, but I can't be definite: I'm having to miss large chunks of the con this year, and it's not yet entirely settled which chunks they are to be.

[sqbr]

Ah, ok. Well, hopefully i will see you during one of the chunks when you are there :)