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Interactive Fiction Game Engines
- 1. Interactive Fiction Reading onlinewith friends? Adam Clare www.RealityisaGame.com adam@WeroCreative.com
- 2. Why? • Back toour roots. It’s like the digital campfire, but with cheesier analogies. • Write scripts and dialogue for your game • Prototype, of course • Become a better writer and game designer • Challenge yourself!
- 3. History • Books. • Twomain types of interactive fiction: • Parser • Click adventure • MUDs
- 4. Famous IF • Zork(1980) • The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (1984) • 80 Days (2014)
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- 6. Engines • StoryNexus • Inform7 • Versu • Twine
- 7. Links • For linksto engines and more see: • http://www.realityisagame.com/archives/2963/gettin g-started-with-some-interactive-fiction
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- 9. StoryNexus • Proprietary softwaremade for the web • Followed the development of earlier game engines • Online library of games made on their software • Like other proprietary systems, no common language :(
- 10. ‘Storylets’ - alsocalled ‘cards’ - describe events that might happen: • an argument with an old flame • a fight on a hilltop at sunset • a long bath • midwifing wolves or kittens. A storylet consists of a starting event, one or more choices (usually), and the results of those choices. ‘Qualities’ describe effects that have happened: • the fact that you had that argument • how serious were the wounds you suffered in the fight • how much soap you have left after the bath • how many wolves (or kittens) you brought safely into the world. A character has a quality at a specified level - 1, 5 or 200, for example. (It doesn’t always display as a number, but more on that later.) To put it another way, storylets model choices, and qualities model consequences.
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- 12. Inform 7 • Cancreate ‘relations’ between objects in the game world • “The room next to us is the Ball Pit” • Character creation for interesting responses • Cascading IF statements
- 13. • Library ofextensions to expand functionality • Collaboration tools with collaboration built into their approach • Export to PDF, web, z-machine, and Quixe • Host anywhere • Runs on any system
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- 15. Versu • Proprietary softwarebased on Inform 7 • Thus similar in concepts • Starts with genre and works outwards from there • “Story files” (roles, premise, and context) • “Character files” (descriptions)
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- 17. Concerns: • Copyright issues •No fan fiction • Abide by the ToS • We’ve all read them, right?
- 18. Concerns: • Who ownswhat you create? • What if you want to sell your story? • What happens if the website dies? • Etc.
- 19. Concerns: • Ontology! • You’reusing somebody else’s approach • These all take effort to learn like any other system. • We’re still repeating the same mistakes as before.
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- 21. Why I Loveit • Visual • Easy • Accesible • Open source • Active, helpful, community
- 22. I’ll just showyou • Let’s play Twine!
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- 24. Issues: • Length! • Easyto create means that there’s a lot of 50 Shades of writing • Screen reading compatibility • ROI (if you care about that)
- 25. Issues: • Out ofcontrol IF statements • Debugging can be difficult
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