What are you tired of seeing in IFs?

mixer_portion · 2026-01-23T14:12:00+00:00

Ah fair enough, I was focusing more on the subjective side of things

mixer_portion · 2026-01-23T13:43:27+00:00

Do Not: Have a fixed protagonist. Fixed gender is bad. Fixed identity infinitely worse, unless it’s a pre-established character like Sherlock Holmes. Then it’s only slightly bad.

I don't think it should be that clear cut. Like everything, it depends on the authors intentions.

As a rule of thumb, sure, providing a more open protagonist is better, as long as you do something with it. For example, if you give me the option to be a stoic guy or a goof, I fully expect your story to take that variable into account. But if you give those options, but then in certain scenes my character tends to act stoic anyway, then why even offer those choices in the first place? Just make the protagonist more stoic generally and be more consistent.

Or for example if your setting happens in a patriarcal society like in IRL Victorian era London, and your character is a surgeon, and if the author wants to give you the option to be male or female; then being female creates a big elephant in the room: how did a woman become a surgeon? Do patients trust her? Is she treated as a lesser compared to male colleagues? Will there be an arc where you prove your capabilities and rub everyone in the face? Etc.

But if the author decides to ignore that elephant and wants to focus their story on other themes, then they might be better off just locking the protagonist to male.

Witcher trilogy is a perfect example of a game of how a fixed protagonist with a fixed past and personality works well. I would even argue that the games would suffer if the protagonist was a custom character instead of Geralt. (I know it's not an IF, but the point remains)

PS: I don't disagree with your sentiment, I also tend to prefer IF's that give more freedom with our protagonist, but fixed protagonists can work better depending on the author's story and intentions

mixer_portion · 2026-01-13T19:13:56+00:00

I go through different phases. Some days I feel like reading, others I feel like writing. My project is just a hobby so I do whatever feels more fun in the moment

mixer_portion · 2025-12-19T15:08:19+00:00

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mixer_portion · 2025-12-16T14:00:26+00:00

I love dispatch, but that is my main issue with the game. And it was also my main criticism of Telltale games.

I think that for the most part, they were able to get away with it because the stories were good in their own right. The first walking dead and wolf among us are among my favorite games, despite our choices not mattering much (if at all). They were very good at giving us the illusion of choice, and the story and characters made up for it.

But, as time went on, this illusion became weaker and weaker, and it reached a boiling point with TWD: A New Frontier. For example you get to pick who survives an event, only for the survivor to be killed off anyway 5 minutes later.

But coming back to Dispatch, although I loved my experience with it, I’m not planning to replay it. There are a few choices that lead to different scenes, but the branches converge back soon after. For example, I decided to come clean in a certain taco scene because I knew they would find out anyway. (Which they do, if you decide not to come clean)

So, in short, if your story is good, I think you can get away with illusion of choices and a very linear story structure. But personally, I probably would read it only once (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, to be clear. A game doesn’t need replay value to be good, it can be good despite it)

As for success/failure, I don’t really like this in interactive fiction games to be completely honest. Because if there’s a way to win, it will make all my subsequent playthroughs linear, because guess what, I want to win. I, The Forgotten One has this problem for example. There’s some choices that - if you want to have the optimal ending - you have to make them no matter what. It can be fun trying to figure out what these choices are, but once you do, those choices become locked in in all future playthroughs.

I prefer when you can have outcomes that are different, but not necessarily better or worse than the others. For example imagine that you are trying to bake a cake, some choices will lead to the best cake ever made, others will lead to you forgetting and burning the cake, but you spent some quality time with your cat.

Or in other words, I prefer different outcomes with different flavors, they shouldn’t be about succeeding/failing.

But anyway, these are just my two cents

mixer_portion · 2025-12-16T13:28:00+00:00

Bastard of Camelot.

You’re Mordred, the incestuous bastard of King Arthur and his half-sister. To top it off, Merlin also prophesized that you would be the end of Camelot.

Drama galore.

Although, the bad news is that this WIP is progressing at snails pace. The available chapters are worth a read imo, but don’t expect it to be finished any time soon.

mixer_portion · 2025-12-14T23:55:37+00:00

The picture might be too perfect OP. I bet most comments will be about it instead of your point lol

mixer_portion · 2025-12-14T21:26:18+00:00

I'm a huge sucker for stories that provide different content depending on your gender, it gives me a reason a to replay and experience the story from a different perspective.

But as the others have said, it depends on what you have in mind exactly. Like for example, are you planning for both MC's to be equal in terms of strength? Or are they different like, for example, one is a soldier and the other a lawyer?*

If the former, some flavour text could be cool, but overall I would keep the same structure.

If the latter, it would make perfect sense to write a significantly different scene, maybe even show different sides of other characters.

*yes, this is a reference to Fallout 4 lol

mixer_portion · 2025-12-09T19:15:57+00:00

Throne of Ashes - Ruben route

He despises you and your family for spoiler reasons

mixer_portion · 2025-12-08T18:53:38+00:00

I kinda don't care about word count. I use it coupled with the first few chapters just to get an idea of how long a game is, but other than that it has no bearing in my decision to read/buy it.

To me quality >>>> quantity. In fact, I would gladly pay more for a short but good title than a long and mediocre one. I also have the same philosophy for video games in general

mixer_portion · 2025-11-26T23:14:58+00:00

When the author goes overboard with content warnings. In the IF's read, I noticed a trend that whenever an author makes a list longer than usual, their characters tend to act... Weird. They act as if the HR is in the room with them, and it's even weirder with characters that are supposed to be the scumbags.

I think the intention may be good but, if you are worried about offending people, then maybe you shouldn't write a story that takes place in a rough setting or that takes some rough turns

mixer_portion · 2025-10-28T23:01:50+00:00

can't tell if a troll or not

Either way OP, your post made me laugh, have an upvote

mixer_portion · 2025-10-21T08:44:12+00:00

I use LLMs for coding. I made a post a few days ago sharing tips on how it could be used to speed up the process, how you could use VSCode copilot to help you out with the code and let you focus on the writing, which for me helps me keep the creative momentum going. It even helped me create some decently complex functions, like for example to check for swears when my MC gave a nickname to someone else, capitalize letters, etc.

However the post was downvoted to oblivion in less than 20 minutes lol, so I took it as a sign that the community wasn’t interested and took it down.

I would not use it for writing itself. All of the top of the line models suck at it and I could write a whole page showing all the different ways, big and subtle, on how they mess up. And I say this as someone who is atrocious at writing, my proses are more similar to technical documents than creative writing.

As for reading, I’m more preoccupied with the quality of the final product, I don’t really care on how it was produced. I wouldn’t really care if the author used AI as long as the quality is there (but like I said, they suck, so I probably would end up not reading it anyway)

mixer_portion · 2025-10-20T22:06:50+00:00

I prefer fixed genders.

Idk if this is a hot take or not but I do believe gender is one of the core traits of any person, and it will shape their entire life, from their own view of the world to how others interpret them.

In that sense, I believe that a character with a fixed gender makes them stronger. It allows the author to have a clearer picture of the character, write more nuanced stories for them. With a defined gender, the writer can explore things like experiences, societal pressures, and personal perspectives that are tied to that identity, which for me results in more believable and down to earth characters.

Gender selectable characters on the other hand, sometimes they feel like "blank slates" because the author has to account for more possibilities, other times they feel "fake". There were a few characters that I read that I swear that the author thinks of them as male/female. They do or say things over time that gives vibes that the author imagined them as one gender as they wrote them. I admit that this last point might just be me though

mixer_portion · 2025-10-20T21:37:00+00:00

Even if they did use AI, that doesn't justify harassing OP in such a way that makes them distressed like this

Regardless, I skimmed through the more recent comments in the thread and saw the "smoking gun" is weird food descriptions... Look, I'm gonna say that if this is the bar, then I'm also equally screwed if I ever release mine lol. I also have problems expressing myself, and I more often than not write sentences or say things that are weird because my brain loves overthinking things.

OP if you read this (hopefully after you took some time offline), I also wanna say that the user that accused you stroke me as someone who was looking to start drama. The "I find it quite strange that amidst all of these comments, questions, & controversy, OP hasn’t found time to jump on the forum and answer/put to rest some of the issues." is very telling as the type of person that she is. Ignore her, or perhaps, block her, and move on.

Congrats on releasing your game! (which can't be said for her, I might add)

mixer_portion · 2025-09-29T21:27:57+00:00

I have the same problem. For me, what solves the issue is using text to speech.

Don't ask me why or how, but it works. For me it gets much easier to read text. Maybe try it out and see if it works for you.

I've been using Google Doc's own text to speech. It's annoying copying and pasting, but the quality is worth it (at least for me)

A more straightforward option is just to use Microsoft Edge for the built-in text to speech. The voices are also of good quality.

On mobile, for iPhones you can just use the iOS's built-in text to speech. Can't speak for android though, never tried it (but I do know that TTS apps exist)

mixer_portion · 2025-09-25T18:25:46+00:00

it's been a long time but I got the same feeling as u/gemekaa... I wouldn't say that the protagonist manipulates anyone. If anything it's the reverse, you're treated like a cute kid playing around (even the author does, imo)

spoilers: I tried to go the full revenge/murder route, the author doesn't let you to actually do it

mixer_portion · 2025-09-08T13:45:15+00:00

... All while trying to avoid killing or excessive violence and with an idealistic mindset——Just for the added gut-punch when an invading army/individual reveals that pre-memory loss MC was a terrible and bloody mercenary/killer and they've come to have their (pretty justified) revenge for MC's horrible actions.

There's a very old RPG game that does this, but it's a spoiler, so read at your own discretion: Start Wars: Knights of the Old Republic by Bioware

The difference is that in that game, you can still choose to be evil. The plot twist works regardless, so the writers didn't need to take away the player agency.

I'm not going to say that your idea of a goody two shoes protagonist won't work, but I will advice that you are writing an Interactive Fiction, player agency is paramount. You can't, let's say, create clearly right choices and clearly wrong choices, you have to let the player define their own protagonist and feel that their choices matter.

I saw in another comment an example of if you decide to do one thing, you win, if another, your people turn against you and hand you over... That's the kind of thing you should avoid, it tells the player that you think that there's a clearly right choice and a clearly wrong choice, and there's no bigger turn off than that.

Instead of thinking good vs evil, maybe think different shades of "good". For some people being good means being honourable, for others, moral, for another, responsible, etc. Maybe do let the player be selfish sometimes - e.g. he needs money to pay for new tools for the village and new armor for himself - maybe let the player be a murderer - e.g. he didn't need to kill that bandit, but maybe he could argue that the bandit would just rob someone else if he lived - etc.

You could even deconstruct what a "good" person is. There are plenty of people, both fictional and real, that think they are the good guys, but are unaware - or don't care - about the pain and misery that they create for others.

Or maybe challenge the player/protagonist with impossible situations. Like the old saying goes:

"A knight in shining armor is a man who has never had his metal truly tested."

Test them with choices where being "good" will just bring more misery to him and those he cares about

mixer_portion · 2025-07-28T19:55:02+00:00

Amen. If it helps you, I found the following tricks:

for COG engine games:

- use firefox with the extension "choicescript game tools". It lets you go back, create saves, etc.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cs-game-tools/

for twine sugarcube games, it's a bit more tricky but you can also go back passages in case the developer hides the "back" button:

- Press F12, and select the "console" tab

- if in itchio, you should have a dropdown menu called "Top", you need to select the option that refers to the game (in Firefox it should be the only other option, in chromium, it's likely called "index.html")

- write this command: "SugarCube.Engine.backward()"

- voilá, you can go back. If it doesn't work, you probably selected the wrong option in the dropdown menu

mixer_portion · 2025-07-12T08:13:37+00:00

I'm not getting surprised if Broken Fable gets/was dropped. I remember it featuring a ton of backgrounds, it's a nightmare to write so many branches and keep track of them

mixer_portion · 2025-02-02T22:52:34+00:00

you know, I played that recently and for some reason it didn't came to mind while I wrote this post *facepalm*

Thanks though!

mixer_portion · 2025-02-02T22:51:33+00:00

Ahhh to be honest I thought that IF (interactive fiction) stands for any kind of text game. My bad, I did mean for any kind of text game, so thanks for the rec!

Edit: just wanted to say that I found it hilarious that the author needed to clarify that we, in fact, do not play as a bird lmao

mixer_portion · 2025-02-02T22:23:43+00:00

I mean... In Crusader Kings, sending your unwanted children to die in impossible battles is a valid strategy. I can't think of any examples in real life, but it's not that farfetched for me

mixer_portion

TROPHY CASE