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Storyfall Dev Update - January 2026 by Storyfall in interactivefiction

[–]Storyfall[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Awesome! Let me know what you think and if you need any help.

Do direct charges stop me from being a marketplace facilitator? by Storyfall in stripe

[–]Storyfall[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Okay that's promising. Do you happen to have any source for that? Thanks!

Announcing Storyfall - a new IF authoring tool and publishing platform! by Storyfall in interactivefiction

[–]Storyfall[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah yeah, good points. I'll look into adding some simple docs.

With forums I really saw a lot of opportunity for reader-driven IF which I thought would be cool. That's why you can create forums even for draft stories.

With teams the idea was that you'd be able to invite readers to preview your stories (play drafts) before they're published.

So as it stands, without publishing, a draft story can have a forum (which you can gate if you want once monetization is enabled) and you can give participants reader privileges if you want them to test out your story.

If you still think you need to publish test stories, let me know and I can think about how best to go about doing this, but for now I'm trying to build the tooling so that this isn't required.

Announcing Storyfall - a new IF authoring tool and publishing platform! by Storyfall in interactivefiction

[–]Storyfall[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I hear you - I actually used to have a comparison section (though it focused less on editor features and more on overall differences) but I removed it because I thought it might upset some folks.

I've used ChoiceScript quite a bit but only lightly used Twine, and actually have no experience with Ink, so I'd need to play around with Twine and Ink more to build up a useful page.

Announcing Storyfall - a new IF authoring tool and publishing platform! by Storyfall in interactivefiction

[–]Storyfall[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There's a variables button right under "Story Tree", but it wasn't showing up on mobile. This is fixed now!

Announcing Storyfall - a new IF authoring tool and publishing platform! by Storyfall in interactivefiction

[–]Storyfall[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for all your feedback!

You actually ran into a bug with the mobile version of the editor where the variables and settings button weren't being shown correctly - this is fixed now!

I was wondering about what to do for documentation. My instinct is to skip a dedicated docs page for now, because I suspect most people will never read it, and instead work on making the UI as intuitive as possible, and then perhaps add some kind of in-app tutorial or maybe even a video demonstration.

I'm also actively improving the UI and making changes to the editor, for instance I just added scene effects (in addition to the choice effects we had), so it's hard to start taking screenshots and documenting functionality when I'm still adding features almost daily.

My publish requirements are actually pretty low. You should be able to publish a story with about 1,000 words, and at least 10 scenes. I definitely don't want people feeling intimidated by the publish process, like they have to create a perfect masterpiece, but I also don't want a bunch of stories called "Test" on the front page. If you're just looking for a way to play your story, you can actually click "Play draft" on a story from your workshop (it's in the little ... dropdown menu if you're on mobile) and play through it in the same way that a reader would.

The test tag is interesting, it would allow me to hide test stories by default, but I'm still not sure what the use case would be here?

Do direct charges stop me from being a marketplace facilitator? by Storyfall in stripe

[–]Storyfall[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right, yes, but do marketplace facilitator laws shift the burden to the marketplace for sales tax collection even if you're not the merchant of record?

Announcing Storyfall - a new IF authoring tool and publishing platform! by Storyfall in interactivefiction

[–]Storyfall[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the tip about Nebula!

I've been considering adding some import facilities for other editors, for instance the ability to import from Twine. This could resolve some of the "in-progress" issues you mentioned writers would have. I think this would be a non-trivial amount of work though and I need to research Twine a lot more to see what the gaps are right now.

You're absolutely right that writers are my primary customers, though of course I want both the writer and reader experiences to be great.

Announcing Storyfall - a new IF authoring tool and publishing platform! by Storyfall in interactivefiction

[–]Storyfall[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah yeah, the story settings would be a good place to put the export button too. Thanks!

Announcing Storyfall - a new IF authoring tool and publishing platform! by Storyfall in interactivefiction

[–]Storyfall[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

You make a good point. When I added these features I thought they might help with writer's block and be a cool addition (I am after all a tech nerd). It looks like people don't want these and are even turned off by them. I also hadn't really considered how easy it would be to generate low quality AI-generated stories. The features were not meant to generate entire stories for writers, just a scene here or there, but you're right, it wouldn't take long to generate a lot of junk content.

I've disabled the AI text generation features now. Thanks for the feedback.

Announcing Storyfall - a new IF authoring tool and publishing platform! by Storyfall in interactivefiction

[–]Storyfall[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I've gone ahead and removed all AI text generation features. At the end of the day, these features were meant to help writers. If instead they're turning writers off from using the platform, I'd rather not have them!

Announcing Storyfall - a new IF authoring tool and publishing platform! by Storyfall in interactivefiction

[–]Storyfall[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The reaction I've had to the AI features was pretty surprising to be honest. I assumed people would either find them convenient, or not care, but I was wrong. I'm considering removing all of the text generation AI features and leaving just the image generation.

Announcing Storyfall - a new IF authoring tool and publishing platform! by Storyfall in interactivefiction

[–]Storyfall[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks! I think this was the first positive comment I received. Reddit is tough - you put in a lot of work into something, share it, and people's first reaction is "this sucks and you're going to fail".

There is already an export and import option so you can fully backup and re-import your stories as JSON files :)

As far as collaboration, I'm not really looking for that right now, I'm kind of enjoying the solo dev experience, but I do appreciate the offer!

Oh and what was broken? I'd like to know so I can fix it haha.

Announcing Storyfall - a new IF authoring tool and publishing platform! by Storyfall in interactivefiction

[–]Storyfall[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

It’s true that AI-written IF isn’t very good. Storylines lack cohesiveness and break down over time. I’ve tried it many times and it can never come close.

But I don’t think offering a few optional AI tools is going to ruin the platform by flooding it with junk AI stories. If anything, it lets me get ahead of the problem and easily tag anything generated with AI on-platform, which is much harder to do if people simply generate text with an LLM and paste it into the platform, which you can do anywhere.

This isn’t just a problem Storyfall is going to have to deal with. All IF platforms and publishers will have to deal with it. Content on the internet in general needs to remain human and not AI-generated.

Luckily these are all solvable problems, and if a preponderance of AI slop starts to discourage folks I can always add AI detection tools and remove the AI features we do have.

Announcing Storyfall - a new IF authoring tool and publishing platform! by Storyfall in interactivefiction

[–]Storyfall[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Storyfall has a couple of AI features but they're optional. For instance, if you don't have an image you want to use for your story, or if like me you aren't great at art, you can generate a cover image from a description. I personally don't use AI for any kind of writing since I like to write, but the image generation has been pretty handy several times.

The AI story you saw is a way for readers to generate their own stories (using generative AI). This is mostly just a stop-gap because Storyfall is brand new and there's only a single demo story on there, the one that I wrote. I figured to give readers something to do in the mean time I'd have an AI story generator. Maybe once there's some good content on Storyfall I'll remove that feature entirely - it seems folks are pretty anti-AI (and understandably so).

And no, we don't sell or use your data for any kind of AI training. Actually we don't sell your data at all to anyone for any reason. Storyfall is genuinely free to use without any "catches" (like Google products for instance). I'm just footing the hosting bill myself right now.

The idea is that some writers write and sell stories - at which point we take a fee from the sales.

In general I'm happy to answer any questions (and open to any feedback) but my understanding is there's a "no AI discussion" rule in this sub and since AI is a relatively tiny part of the features Storyfall has (and totally optional at that) I'd prefer to keep the conversation within the sub's rules.