You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Combining Interactive Fiction with Steem - Text adventures, multiple choice and visual novels
Love the idea! I'm a writer, and would be very interested in working on a text adventure! Any updates on the software? Any means to get in touch?
Hi, sorry about the late reply. Since there was barely any interest in the idea I've shelved it for now. I do plan to write an improved version of Ink though, which is right now the easiest and most powerful software for creating interactive fiction in my opinion, much better than Twine.
I plan to use the same script language Ink uses, which is basically something like Markdown for writing interactive fiction without programming, but I'll rewrite it using the Red programming language, so you won't need to use a giant Electron app and a Windows only compiler, instead it'll be a 1 Mb real native app on Mac & Windows and soon Linux and Android as Red adds support for those targets.
Compiling to web is also planned for the Red language, so at some point I can probably use it to go back to the initial idea of combining interactive fiction with Steem on a website.
More gameplay oriented interacive fiction often display things like RPG stats and health, Twine games often do that. With my version of Ink, this won't be done with HTML but real native operating system widgets, your stories will be compiled to native machine code.
I'll probably start working on that in a month or two, as time allows. The parser for Ink's scripting language will be part of my guide for the Red programming language. At the top of the guide you can also find my email address if you want to contact me privately.
In the guide I will just cover writing the compiler for the script language, so it can be used as a drop in replacement for Ink's Windows only compiler. The next step is to create my own interactive fiction authoring software using it, with lots of added features. One thing I want to do is replace the simple programming language you can use in Ink with the Red language, so that you have a real programming language available to use when you need to do more advanced things. While I was using Ink I noticed that the programming language it uses is just way too limiting, it makes things harder not easier. While Red is a real programming language, one of its goals is to be easy to use for beginners, so it seems like the perfect fit here.