Storycade

remember when I said that with every new piece of fanart my power grows, and soon I’d be powerful enough to make a crappy forgetting the coin interactive fiction game with a ton of new content? well,

Cyber-Readout is a short story where the plot is randomly generated. You can play multiple times to get different plotlines.

I’ve made it available for free on itch.io and hopefully it’ll be the first of many writing projects I finish and publish :D

porpentine released a pack of like 20 interactive fiction games called Eczema Angel Orifice which you can buy and play right on your computer device!

If you’ve never played an IF game before, I highly suggest you try them out. Even if you’re not the type of person to play video games, they’re worth giving a try. They’re not like traditional games and are more like … well, interactive fiction. Fuck, the title for the genre is really accurate.

At any rate, I played Howling Dogs for class once and I was immediately smitten with Porpentine’s writing after that. The stuff I’ve played is what I would call apocalyptic nightmarescape, and if you’ve got an aversion to blood and gore, you might want to shy away from it. (It’s text based, but I know a couple of my followers get queezy even reading abotut hat stuff.) Both HD and WTWLA are very detached from reality, but are very meditative/reflective games. I’m still diving into the other stuff in EAO, but I’m trying to tell myself to only play one a night to sort of savor the experience.

At any rate, weird gaming habits aside, if you’re looking for a really good way to spend 20-30 minutes, I suggest checking out Howling Dogs (play online here) and With Those We Love Alive (play online here). Both are free, browser-based Twine games.

If you end up falling for her work as much as I did, go buy Eczema Angel Orifice! It’s only $5! If you want to show your support but can’t buy the game right now, go vote to have it greenlit on Steam!

Hey, if you develop visual novels, interactive fiction, or other story-oriented game types, you might be interested in a site I’m creating called StoryDevs. It will allow you to make and search profiles based on criteria like availability, role (artist, writer, etc.), whether you want compensation, and so on.

As you can see the site is functional but still under development — the search works and there’s a few early profiles. Registrations aren’t open yet, but you can reserve your handle. Your handle will form the link to your profile, e.g., storydevs.com/my_handle

the uncle who works for nintendo

You are a kid who has been invited to your best friend’s house for a sleepover. Who is your friend? All the player knows is their name

and that their mysterious uncle works for Nintendo. 

The night starts out fairly normal with you guys eating dinner, spaghetti of course, and ends with heaping bowls of ice-cream. Afterwards you two go up to your friend’s room. The longer you stay, the more you realize that not everything is as it should be. You can examine the environment, talk to your friend, or reflect. You have limited time, so how you use it matters. 

the uncle who works for nintendo is by Michael Lutz, author of another text-based game My Father’s Long, Long Legs. Unlike the latter, this game has multiple endings; some may be easier to get than others. Fortunately, the game gives you pointers on how to achieve the other endings after you finish one of them.

S̡ix̕

Aevee Bee’s post-mortem of We Know The Devil is basically required reading for anyone looking to write a visual novel or text adventure (or any videogame really.) Choice quote:

Terminal Quest

Late night comfy interactive fiction session.

tw: transphobia

Aevee Bee’s post-mortem of We Know The Devil is basically required reading for anyone looking to write a visual novel or text adventure (or any videogame really.) Choice quote:

**COME BACK TO THIS**

Read-Only Memories is a pretty fun adventure with a pretty good story. It had lots of fun queer characters, and a pretty engaging plot about the development of artificial sapience. Like The Infinite Ocean, it had the kind of depiction I like of AIs as essentially similar to humans rather than incomprehensible or malevolent. In fact, the game is centered on the relationship between the protagonist and their AI friend Turing.

Although I enjoyed it and played through it, the game did feel like a slog at times. In this I think it takes too much from classic point-and-click adventures. Adventure games have a lot of overhead—in terms of time and the player’s energy investment—tied up in relatively mundane actions like moving between places and figuring out what actions to take. This puts very different demands on a plot than exist for non-interactive media, and a plot that would work well as a novel may be too slow in a game. The result is this sloggy feeling: that moving the plot forward a small amount takes a large amount of effort. It’s exacerbated by the presence of many interactive background elements, which just adds more stuff that thorough-minded players have to do before they can move the plot forward.