This might be the wrong place to post this, mods feel free to move it if it’s better somewhere else.
Or delete it and yell at me and tell me I’m dumb or whatever, can’t be worse than my last boss was.
I’m kind of sick of the current set of interactive fiction offerings (mostly not the fault of authors imo... please put away the pitchforks until later, you’ll get your chance), so I started looking into making my own with solutions that are widely available using the usual suspects. I realized that the current tooling for making these solutions is one part of the problem, and it’s a fucking huge problem. The other is teaching people to use these tools correctly. I’m starting a project to make a new more open source completely free project to make a more fully featured engine\framework for HTML games.
There are two core elements of this:
One is to make a tool with more sensible/technical access to the core engine/logic structure so that creators can more directly change the platform if they want more easily. Also so that fans can mod the game meaningfully and relatively easily. I’m not going to add weird but barely functional DRM or other access control shenanigans, as those things are far better handled by serving the html game online and gating access to it via website access limitations on the server instead. Lust for life is a good example of this.
The other is to provide guides to making better stories with the platform. In the past I’ve worked in book sales and seen a lot of the insides of the whole book industry. There are a lot of resources to identify and fix mistakes and to help storytellers make good decisions, and many of these are freely available so authors use them before harassing publishers. Many of these things are not obvious especially when knees deep in technical stuff to get your story working.
All of us can probably identify that wandering around an empty house looking for your step-landlord to try to find events to trigger is annoying. When you’re writing the game and have perfect knowledge of where everything is, this problem isn’t clear. It’s also not clear that you can create a passage that is “look around the house for anything interesting going on” with a tooltip that says “this will take all afternoon and you might discover something interesting/don’t think there’s anything interesting here” to give hints to the player on what sort of risk they’re taking and what they’re likely to get out of it.
Seriously why does no one use tooltips. I feel like tying them to chairs clockwork orange style with tutorials on it playing on a loop. Half the passages in some stories could be tooltip descriptors that can be not looked at to avoid walls of text that never change, and the other half of the passages you’re expected to remember everything about a character that is never described after their introduction.
The back button in twine is also a plague. It encourages design where you save scum and rely overly heavily on random events for progress instead of having multiple steps to work toward a goal you want to time gate or the ability to control the games pacing at all. I’m half convinced that a lot of people have an empty room exploration fetish, they just aren’t brave enough to admit it, and the 5% chance random events once a day are cover for it.
These are fixable solutions and I aim to empower authors by giving them tools and education on how to use those tools well/avoid mistakes with them.
I will make this thing totally free, and regardless of if I get any support. I need the web design experience and html\javascript\json experience for future project I hope to work toward anyways. I am fully aware this is a piracy forum first and foremost and know that I may not get any money from this at all. I’m very, very ok with that. On the other hand if people have financial support to offer and want to see tools to allow html stories/games in the adult space be what they could be then I’d greatly appreciate any financial support you can give.
I’m never building a DRM content locking or pay gating system into the core game engine. Do that with access via accounts and web servers.
I’m not going to condense or obfuscate the code. I’m going to keep it as readable as possible. You shouldn’t need to run utilities to make the code readable or accessible ever with web content designed to be run on your computer, especially if you’re downloading and running it locally.
I’m going to support it for as long as I can viably do that.
I’m going to break some rules making it, possibly on accident. I’m a web design learner and I’m going to do my best to follow reasonably best practice but I can’t make promises that I won’t be able to keep.
I’m not meaningfully changing scope once this things starts moving. I can start a new project with new scope to do that after full-release. Full release shouldn’t take forever. I’m not gonna switch to just selling ship jpgs and give up on the core product.
The only thing you actually get for donating (besides the project which is why you should donate if you do) is access to some patreon chat.
I will absolutely use additional resources to get some things if I hit thresholds that allow it:
Web dev assistance in making a visually appealing web page is a big one. Why does ever html game feel like a geocities web site? Because the platform is kind of like a geocities web site.
If you give people an empty box and they’re not decorators they just end up with a mostly empty box with ugly/poorly placed decorations and a few cool things placed in weird spots that were their focus. This fits most html games absurdly well.
I’m looking to change that, and if you want to help I’d encourage checking it out.
Hivemindscribe is my username on patreon if you want to check it out there. I'm below the 3 post threshold so I'll not link it.
Feel free to make recommendations and like it even if you don’t want to donate. Any engagement with it helps me understand how much support for this sort of tool or better html story support would exist. Likewise if you know authors that would appreciate being told about this project I would appreciate it. I know I see them trolling around the site pretty often and figure it’s worth putting this here to help try to get their attention, in addition to the sophisticated and classy users of this forum.
I don’t plan to release any content for the engine other than pg13 or cleaner example programs at this time, so patreon shouldn’t baleet me. I’d love to make something, but until the platform is done it’d be a waste of time. I know that’s a concern that comes up a lot.
Or delete it and yell at me and tell me I’m dumb or whatever, can’t be worse than my last boss was.
I’m kind of sick of the current set of interactive fiction offerings (mostly not the fault of authors imo... please put away the pitchforks until later, you’ll get your chance), so I started looking into making my own with solutions that are widely available using the usual suspects. I realized that the current tooling for making these solutions is one part of the problem, and it’s a fucking huge problem. The other is teaching people to use these tools correctly. I’m starting a project to make a new more open source completely free project to make a more fully featured engine\framework for HTML games.
There are two core elements of this:
One is to make a tool with more sensible/technical access to the core engine/logic structure so that creators can more directly change the platform if they want more easily. Also so that fans can mod the game meaningfully and relatively easily. I’m not going to add weird but barely functional DRM or other access control shenanigans, as those things are far better handled by serving the html game online and gating access to it via website access limitations on the server instead. Lust for life is a good example of this.
The other is to provide guides to making better stories with the platform. In the past I’ve worked in book sales and seen a lot of the insides of the whole book industry. There are a lot of resources to identify and fix mistakes and to help storytellers make good decisions, and many of these are freely available so authors use them before harassing publishers. Many of these things are not obvious especially when knees deep in technical stuff to get your story working.
All of us can probably identify that wandering around an empty house looking for your step-landlord to try to find events to trigger is annoying. When you’re writing the game and have perfect knowledge of where everything is, this problem isn’t clear. It’s also not clear that you can create a passage that is “look around the house for anything interesting going on” with a tooltip that says “this will take all afternoon and you might discover something interesting/don’t think there’s anything interesting here” to give hints to the player on what sort of risk they’re taking and what they’re likely to get out of it.
Seriously why does no one use tooltips. I feel like tying them to chairs clockwork orange style with tutorials on it playing on a loop. Half the passages in some stories could be tooltip descriptors that can be not looked at to avoid walls of text that never change, and the other half of the passages you’re expected to remember everything about a character that is never described after their introduction.
The back button in twine is also a plague. It encourages design where you save scum and rely overly heavily on random events for progress instead of having multiple steps to work toward a goal you want to time gate or the ability to control the games pacing at all. I’m half convinced that a lot of people have an empty room exploration fetish, they just aren’t brave enough to admit it, and the 5% chance random events once a day are cover for it.
These are fixable solutions and I aim to empower authors by giving them tools and education on how to use those tools well/avoid mistakes with them.
I will make this thing totally free, and regardless of if I get any support. I need the web design experience and html\javascript\json experience for future project I hope to work toward anyways. I am fully aware this is a piracy forum first and foremost and know that I may not get any money from this at all. I’m very, very ok with that. On the other hand if people have financial support to offer and want to see tools to allow html stories/games in the adult space be what they could be then I’d greatly appreciate any financial support you can give.
I’m never building a DRM content locking or pay gating system into the core game engine. Do that with access via accounts and web servers.
I’m not going to condense or obfuscate the code. I’m going to keep it as readable as possible. You shouldn’t need to run utilities to make the code readable or accessible ever with web content designed to be run on your computer, especially if you’re downloading and running it locally.
I’m going to support it for as long as I can viably do that.
I’m going to break some rules making it, possibly on accident. I’m a web design learner and I’m going to do my best to follow reasonably best practice but I can’t make promises that I won’t be able to keep.
I’m not meaningfully changing scope once this things starts moving. I can start a new project with new scope to do that after full-release. Full release shouldn’t take forever. I’m not gonna switch to just selling ship jpgs and give up on the core product.
The only thing you actually get for donating (besides the project which is why you should donate if you do) is access to some patreon chat.
I will absolutely use additional resources to get some things if I hit thresholds that allow it:
Web dev assistance in making a visually appealing web page is a big one. Why does ever html game feel like a geocities web site? Because the platform is kind of like a geocities web site.
If you give people an empty box and they’re not decorators they just end up with a mostly empty box with ugly/poorly placed decorations and a few cool things placed in weird spots that were their focus. This fits most html games absurdly well.
I’m looking to change that, and if you want to help I’d encourage checking it out.
Hivemindscribe is my username on patreon if you want to check it out there. I'm below the 3 post threshold so I'll not link it.
Feel free to make recommendations and like it even if you don’t want to donate. Any engagement with it helps me understand how much support for this sort of tool or better html story support would exist. Likewise if you know authors that would appreciate being told about this project I would appreciate it. I know I see them trolling around the site pretty often and figure it’s worth putting this here to help try to get their attention, in addition to the sophisticated and classy users of this forum.
I don’t plan to release any content for the engine other than pg13 or cleaner example programs at this time, so patreon shouldn’t baleet me. I’d love to make something, but until the platform is done it’d be a waste of time. I know that’s a concern that comes up a lot.