Game thinking from Adam Clare

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Getting Started With Some Interactive Fiction

Interactive Fiction (IF) is a solid way to deliver a fun game experience. You can find numerous examples at the IF Archive. You can even play the IF of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy!

I’m a big fan of the IF game Horse Master.

But how does one go about making these games?

Here’s an introduction for writing your interactive fiction which I recently presented:

Relevant links from the presentation:
StoryNexus and a quick start guide.
Inform 7
Versu
Twine and a great resource for Twine code.

See more on my game creation page.

Publishing interactive fiction

Once you have your piece completed your game, you should consider submitting to The Interactive Fiction Competition or WordPlay.

With Twine, you can just put your exported file online using the web host of your choosing. If you’re looking for a place to upload your Twine file you can try philome.la, there you can find free hosting.

Spinning A Yarn: Twine For Game Design

For my final #1GAM game I’ve decided to try out Twine. Twine is a tool to make text-based games with no coding knowledge and it’s really easy to use, which has made it a very popular tool. With every passing year there seems to be more and better Twine games.

Earlier this month I attended WordPlay which is a celebration of text-focused games. It’s fun event that gathers game makers and players, so naturally the event has games to play. If you follow me on Twitter you may already know that Horse Master really appealed to me.

Wordplay also has sessions on how to make games from a narrative and technical standpoint. One panel was on how to create your own interactive fiction including alternatives to Twine (I added them to my game creation page).

It looks like the appeal of these kind of games is only growing. This past week the New York Times ran a long article on Twine and the culture surrounding it.

Twine games look and feel profoundly different from other games, not just because they’re made with different tools but also because they’re made by different people — including people who don’t have any calcified notions about what video games are supposed to be or how they’re supposed to work. While roughly 75 percent of developers at traditional video-game companies are male, many of the most prominent Twine developers are women, making games whose purpose is to explore personal perspectives and issues of identity, sexuality and trauma that mainstream games rarely touch on.

Read the full article here.

Almost ironically I feel like this has been one of my worst-written blog posts.

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