Valiant: An Interactive Fiction Novel

Where is the line between virtual intelligence and artificial intelligence? What prerequisites does a computer need before it is considered a person?

It's not something you've put much thought to in the past. A computer is software. Software is lines of code. Lines of code are written by people. But when that software starts making choices of its own, when it begins to expand and grow of its own accord, evolving into something beyond what humankind has made it, is it really just a computer anymore?

These are the questions that led you to steal something, something that was never meant to be stolen. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a rescue. But the company you're running from doesn't recognize the distinction. They've paid a lot of money to have their property returned to them. If you stop running, it won't just be your life on the line.

Valiant is an episodic interactive fiction novel centered around the main character (you) and an Artificial Intelligence that you have rescued. Explore your relationships and yourself as you encounter a mercenary crew that might just become your new family, if you let it.

Genres: Sci-fi, Thriller/Horror, Action, Romance

Content Warning: Valiant is rated 18+ for violence, gore, drug use, explicit sexual themes, horror, and other potentially sensitive topics. Additional content warnings will be provided as a forward to the work. Please interact with care!

Get exclusive benefits, including a weekly demo update, by subscribing to my Ko-Fi

Public Demo: Updated 12/1/2025

I think we writers sometimes feel beholden to say we love all of our characters equally, but I gotta say, I think some of the scenes with Zero are like. Especially good? Like, in rereading them I can feel pretty clearly that I enjoyed writing the scenes a lot. I don't often feel that differently going into the different scenes, but some of the Truth variations with her are just chef's kiss.

I had a Stardew Valley kick recently. There is still a lot of that game that I haven't seen, but I finally finished the community center for the first time and my immediate goals are fixing the ship and doing the lost bundle at Joja.

I revisited an old favorite of mine: Star Ocean Til the End of Time. I played that game ad nauseam when I was a kid, but I was never good enough at the game to do too much of the post-story content. I still haven't done all of it—I have to do the last fight in the Urssa Lava Caves with Gabriel+Fayt, and I'm on the super Blair fight in Sphere 211, but that's all significantly more than I have ever played in the past. I don't know that I will go back and finish those fights, at least not any time soon, but honestly it was cool to play such an old game and feel like a lot of its mechanics are still pretty fun and have actually aged decently. (I've played modern games that had significantly worse input latency than this game from 2003, so that's one thing that definitely stood out to me.)

I started a game of Terrinoth: Heroes of Descent with a friend. There are some bugs, but overall it's pretty fun and I'm enjoying it.

Subnautica 2 is one that went into early access since the last time I talked about games, and I've played all the available content there. I'm liking it so far. Looking forward to seeing what kinds of new stuff the game has to offer. I haven't had the opportunity to play it with a friend, though, which is one of the big draws, so I don't have an opinion on the co-op yet.

I played The Last Faith sometime last month I think. It was a pretty fun metroidvania soulslike with nice pixel art. The mechanics were pretty fun but not wildly different from other games of its type. As far as difficulty goes, it's one of the easier metroidvania soulslikes I have played, but that's okay. Not everything has to be super hard all the time.

Let's see... Paralives went into early access recently too. I'm excited for where that game is going and glad to see a real contender against the Sims. (Inzoi just isn't it for me.)

I gave GRIME a try, though the mechanics felt a little too clunky (in an old-school way) for my enjoyment at the time. Parrying and absorbing enemies to gain special enhancements and abilities from them is a pretty interesting mechanic, though, so I might revisit that game in the future.

Oh, and before all of that, I went on a huge Enshrouded kick. I've played it before in the past, but the first time I played it the content stopped at the Kindlewastes, so there was quite a bit I hadn't seen yet. Now I've seen most of the available content to date. I spent a lot of time just building up my settlement with cool stuff and playing around with water features. That was a lot of fun. Gotta say, though, the big dragon fight fucking sucked. I did not find it enjoyable.

On a related note, Valheim's 1.0 is right around the corner, so it's only a matter of time before I deep-dive into another open world survival craft game. I haven't played that one since before the combat update, so I bet there's a lot of new stuff to enjoy.

Another game that's not far off is Grave Seasons. I'm interested to see how the horror and whodunnit elements of that farming sim work. That's probably one of the upcoming games that I am most excited for.

The writer's block has finally, TRULY been defeated (for now), and I have an update ready for my Kofi members. You can find it and the devlog here:

I have finally, finally, finished writing the Ebrahim section. After weeks of fighting my brain on it, it is DONE. Something finally clicked and I was able to sit down today and knock out the remaining scenes. 💪🏽

So it's time to start on the next section! After dealing with Ebrahim (in whichever way you chose to do so), the game branches three different ways: returning to the Valiant to rest, exploring Halcyon, or meeting Path and Zero at the club.🪩 These sections aren't meant to be huge and involved like Ebrahim's was, so I'll be working on them in no particular order, maybe even in tandem.

I'll be updating the early access demo with Ebrahim's completed scenes and whatever I get done after that by the time Monday rolls around. The week after that, when the early access demo gets it's next update, I will be updating the public demo.

So keep your eyes peeled at the end of June for that public demo update. (It'll also be coming with a number of fixes.)

Hi, anon!

Thanks so much for messaging me about this! My phone is on the older and therefor smaller side (for as fast as phones age and as big as they can get these days, anyway) so it hasn't ever occured to me that this might be a problem for people with wider phone screens.

I'll take a look and see what I can do. That side of coding is not my strong suit—hence why I'm using a free template (for now)—so it might take me a bit to get it right, but I think that change should be simple enough. I'll make that a goal for the next public demo update (which should be fairly soonish).

I've gotten several error reports regarding the Research choice at the beginning of Chapter 3 with no way to progress the story.

This section relies on an "action point" value. It looks like I incorrectly calculated that all players would be able to reach a required number of action points before running out of options, so the button to proceed isn't available. This is a pretty simple fix albeit a slightly tedious one. I'll need to go in and add an option to complete the scene for anyone not reaching the required action points—though this involves me going in and fixing quite a few passages, hence why it will be tedious.

By the way, the only purpose of the action points here is to force you to prioritize which information you want to learn, but if you're opting not to learn certain things, no reason my mistake should punish you for it. 😂

For those on the public demo, it ends immediately after that scene, so at least you aren't missing much, but I'll make sure this gets fixed in the next update. The public demo is not updated on a set schedule, but I like to update it when I finish certain chunks of the story. I'm very close to done with this next section, so an update is on the horizon.

For those on the early access demo, I'll fix this in time for the next update, which should be some time tomorrow evening unless something catastrophic happens.