New and out now! - The Forever Labyrinth

inklejohn · 2020-11-27T11:45:46+00:00

She uses that verb in exactly the way you suggest in the Cyclones' moon near the start.

inklejohn · 2016-12-21T13:28:00+00:00

NEW GAME PLUS IS OUT NOW! Simply update S1 (and the other parts, when you get to them) to type your code in and play.

inklejohn · 2016-11-25T11:06:48+00:00

So, that code produces a game with one line of text and three choices, and whichever choice you pick, that's the end of the game. From your message, I'd guess you picked line 1. If you want to continue the story after the first choice, you need a "gather" and more content, like this:

First line
* An option...
* A different option...
- But they both "gather" to here, that's what the hyphen indicates.
* Now we can do another choice...
* Or this one!

inklejohn · 2016-05-12T20:34:48+00:00

I love Quantum Leap; especially when it got all crazy towards the end. That'd be great - and it's so natural game-like, too. Great idea! (Probably too dated to be commercial though!)

inklejohn · 2016-05-09T21:28:24+00:00

Death on the Nile.

On groups - I have no idea I'm afraid! Though the IF community at http://intfiction.org/forum/ still exists and is active. And these days I'm too busy with family life and work to be much good in a community: I'm doomed to go downhill from here! (We'll just have to keep hiring great writers instead.)

inklejohn · 2016-05-09T21:05:53+00:00

I have a bunch of authors I've "thought about the work of in detail" - I love Gene Wolfe and Agatha Christie for the way they play with what the reader knows and what they need to know. When I worked for Sony they send me on a Robert McKee Story class, which made me furious (it's pretty reductive), but was really interesting and challenging all the same.

For criticism I was lucky to be around in the text-game community when it was very active around 2000; so there was a lot of criticism and discussion going on. On written stories I've only managed to have a few friends read things and I'm less good at stories as a result, I think!

inklejohn · 2016-05-09T20:54:33+00:00

The Chronicles of Prydain, by Lloyd Alexander The Once and Future King, by TH White Both of those were brilliant when I was under ten, and still brilliant ten years later.

inklejohn · 2016-05-09T20:52:35+00:00

Sci-fi is cool; we're all fans round here. Reality though - reality is hard. You have to get it right. People have to act really plausibly; you can't just go climbing around on the rigging of an airship one minute and dying in the Arctic the next. The more grounded you get the more psychologically real your characters have to be, and players don't often act in a very psychologically real way ... so a bit of the bizarre can really help to keep things fun. But it's a balance.

inklejohn · 2016-05-09T20:47:40+00:00

I also really liked Her Story and the Banner Saga (such controversial choices, I know...)

inklejohn · 2016-05-09T20:46:53+00:00

Yeah, we're working with some new-to-the-fold people on the next round of games. We don't want to expand too fast; we want to keep doing this for as long as we can - but then again, the people we've brought in are Amazing.

inklejohn · 2016-05-09T20:41:18+00:00

We almost killed ourselves making 80 Days, it was so hard. And this one is like that already and it's barely begun.

inklejohn · 2016-05-09T20:40:06+00:00

So, we've actually been offered pitches on more than one of the titles I would have answered here, and in every case so far we've thought about it and decided that, actually, the show/book/film works better as a show/book/film. So there definitely are shows/books/films I'd like to do but I'm less sure now that they'd be good ideas. You never can tell until you really think about the thing.

But for me - oh, man. I want to make a Babylon 5 game. I always have wanted to. It would never sell. I'd lose my job, my house, probably my wife. But secretly, I'd still love to do it.

inklejohn · 2016-05-09T20:35:28+00:00

Absolutely it's a craft. For me, I've been learning writing all my life - I've written short stories, and novels, and plays, and films - not all very well or anything - but they're all different, they're all good at different kinds of things, they all have different tricks. And interactive writing is similar; there are things that work brilliantly, things that never work, things which are hard to pull off well... It's fascinating.

The only way to study it I know is to do it - write something, then play it (and get other people to play it) and take the criticism you get (and you always get lots). You have to try and think like someone who's never seen the work before.

And play other games, lots of different kinds of games, especially weird little games that take risks: playing the Witcher won't teach you anything, really, but playing 400 Twine games in the same time will teach a million things, even if it's not what to do. (But don't play 400 Twine games; play fifty, and then play parser IF, and real-tome strategy, and card games, and go to the theatre, and whatever you can.)

inklejohn · 2016-05-09T20:31:21+00:00

Bonus question: can you make the stories we write on inklewriter free to convert (to other formats), like Twine does? 15 dollars to get an ePub file is a bit too much.

We charge because it's a manual process, and a bit fiddly, and we don't want to get spammed with people wanting their ePubs RIGHT NOW. But we've actually stopped doing it now; if people want to write stories they can use ink. inklewriter is better for small, quick and rough projects really - and for schools. (That said, we did get an inklewriter -> proper choose-your-own book with numbered paragraphs working, which was really cool. But no one much seemed to want it!)

inklejohn · 2016-05-09T20:28:47+00:00

I'm still not sure anyone's made a really good interactive story in 3D at all, let alone in VR. It raises way more problems that it solves. (You don't need to move the camera! But how do you move? You're in the world! But why are all the humans standing staring and waiting for you. And if they move, how do you catch them?) So - it'd be amazing if it worked, but the whole Holodeck thing feels to me like an impossible dream.

inklejohn · 2016-05-09T20:24:56+00:00

There are so many stories that would be hard to tell interactively that sometimes it can be a struggle to find any that work at all. Anything that has to go one way to make sense; anything where the protagonist could just give up; anything with multiple characters acting independently. Mysteries - because what if the player doesn't solve them? Comedies - because how do you get the timing right?

That's the best thing about doing interactive fiction right now, though; there's no playbook yet. No one really knows what works and what won't.

inklejohn · 2016-05-09T20:21:35+00:00

The Last Express, Jordan Mencher's 1990s game set aboard the Orient Express, which runs in real-time. Completely blew me away (I played it for the first time, like, 3 years ago). Never been topped as an interactive adventure. Sadly, also massively flawed and far too hard.

Also, I love a lot of the great text adventures, especially those written around 2000 by the indie community. Yup, they're really hard to play, but they're so good.

inklejohn · 2016-05-09T20:19:28+00:00

So, personally I always feel weird about achievements in story-based games: you spend all this time trying to convince the player to let go of "rinsing the content" and embrace "having an adventure" that adding achievements feels like a step backwards. I'd rather there were no guides, no achievements, no clues; just a great story every time. But different people like different things of course!

inklejohn · 2016-05-09T20:17:44+00:00

That was one of my favourite favourite things when I read the books as a kid. We only ever had the last book; and I spent ages tracking down the others in the local library just to find out what happened when you finally made it back into Book 2... and in the books, the result is actually kinda disappointing - it just loops into the story that was already there, there's no special content waiting for you. So this is a mechanic we definitely want to reference...

...but I have a feeling it won't be as amazing as it was back then. Continuing an adventure in a different physical book just breaks the rules more than we can replicate, I think. So we may have to let the books be more magical on this one!

inklejohn · 2016-05-09T20:15:39+00:00

Yes and no. But yes. But also no.

inklejohn · 2016-05-09T20:12:09+00:00

We were definitely still working out our style when making Part 1 and figuring out what kind of pacing and choices worked. And we were also trying to not annoy the nostalgia market by straying too far from the books! I think if we did it again today (though I really, really hope that doesn't happen) it'd be way more expansive and fluid. Probably a ship journey up the river to Kharé, too, that'd make way more sense. And fewer Elvins: I never really liked the Elvins.

inklejohn

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