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 :)