Combining Interactive Fiction with Steem - Text adventures, multiple choice and visual novels

Interactive fiction is becoming popular again, especially multiple choice “choose your own adventure” style games because they are so easy to play on smartphones. They are actually being sold in stores again, on Steam and on the mobile app stores, and there are many tools now to create them without having to program.

Image credit: Adventure by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 ImageCreator

I worked on some tools myself over the past 15 years or so. In fact, I’ve written software that lets you create visual novels right in the browser, without programming and even software that lets you create sophisticated text adventures like Infocom’s famous Zork in the browser without programming.

You would just write “take the lamp” and then the computer creates an item called “lamp” and infers from the command “take” that it can be taken and dropped. Write “open chest” and the chest becomes an item that can be opened and closed, write “put lamp into chest” and the chest also becomes a container that can hold items. Examine the chest and you get a default description “There is nothing unusual about the chest”. Click on the text and you can edit it to say something more appropriate.

All without any programming. You just play the game as if it already existed and by doing so, create it. This already gets you 90% of the way there and for more complex interactions, I built a rule based system that lets you create anything you could imagine without having to learn a complex user interface or programming language first. Text adventures, due to their open world nature and the natural language processing that is involved, are easily the most complex of the three basic types of interactive fiction. Multiple choice software I haven’t worked on, but that’s the easiest of the three and very similar to visual novels from a technical standpoint.

And what has that got to do with Steem?

I’ve always wanted to make a website where you can easily create interactive fiction and share it with others. On Steem there seems to be quite a big community of writers and people interested in interactive fiction judging by the popularity of my own articles on that topic, so I thought I’d try and see if there is enough interest in me developing a Steem based website which would allow you to create all three kinds of interactive fiction without programming, that other people can then play and upvote if they like it. So you’d actually be able to make money creating visual novels, text adventures and choose your own adventure games without having to go through the complex process of selling them in a store. I think this could lead to some really high quality and interesting new stories being written.

I also really want to support the concept of neverending stories, that you can update with new content regularly and without the readers losing their progress. Imagine a detective story where readers can solve cases and new cases are added all the time, while you don’t lose any of the progress you made so far (like money you made from working on prior cases, relationships with people you met and so on).

Since Steem posts can only earn money in the first 7 days, it would be best to release your fiction chapter by chapter, so that’s something I’ll keep in mind when designing the software. Later on when Smart Media Tokens are available, that might be an option too, so that the 7 day limitation could be removed. You do of course retain the full rights to your stories, so you could also use Steem to finance the development of your story chapter by chapter and then sell the finished product in a store. I could add export functionality for Mac/Win/Linux/iOS/Android if there is enough interest to pay for the development costs of that.

Exporting as a downloadable .html file is something I'll do for sure, so that you can freely share, sell or do whatever you want with the stories you create without having to rely and be dependent on my website, I prefer freedom to vendor lock-ins.

I’d start the website with the multiple choice style interactive fiction, then add visual novels just because it’s basically the same so I can reuse a lot of the code and then finally text adventures in the style of Zork. While I might reuse some code of tools I’ve already written, it’s probably better to just rewrite everything from scratch, I’ve got a decade more experience now and there are much better programming languages and frameworks for the web today. But since I already know how to do it, it won’t take that long.

Due to my work on Columns for Steem, a Tweetdeck style interface for Steem, I’m already very familiar with Steem programming as well, so that shouldn't be a problem either.

So let me know if you’re interested by upvoting and it would be great if you could leave a comment telling me if you’re more interested in writing or reading these interactive stories (or just upvote a comment you agree with), which of the three types of interactive fiction you like best (Visual novel, choose your own adventure, text adventure) and any other feedback you have.

If there is a lot of interest, I’ll start working on the website right away and release the first basic version in about two weeks which will allow you to create and play some basic multiple choice stories, and then I’ll add new features once a week. I think this would be a great, novel addition to the Steem platform that might also attract some new people.