What the everloving fuck is Interactive Fiction???
It’s fancy talk for CYOA books (and software simulating such, like ChoiceScript games) and text adventures, although mostly it refers to the first one from how I’ve seen it used in common parlance. It technically does not refer to visual novels but who cares, it’s my thread and I say it’s fine to talk about the text portion of that sort of thing.
They can be either really good or really trash, just like anything else in existence. Either way, let’s talk about the IF we’ve made!
I’ve been working on a couple, personally; one is still in planning, but the other is technically available for early testing. I’d post it, but, ehhh… Feels weird to link my own stuff in a group thread OP. Also I need to update the web version.
I’ve been working on and off on a text adventure in Quest. I’ve actually gotten pretty far in it so far, though I always run into the issue where I get stuck writing a story portion and instead of powering through it like I should I get distracted going back and adding a billion unique verb outcomes to previous scenes.
Late as hell but I love me some forum CYOAs and just how diverse they can be in terms of scope, focus and complexity ranging from “simple” stuff like prose with choices to be voted on to essentially strategy/RPG approaches by getting the community involved heavily mechanically. No way I’d feel confidant enough to actually run one, though.
If you’d like to find out more you can always check out regular haunts at places such as: