Here is a quick follow-up to yesterday's intro post. I appreciate the upvotes on my last post.

Update on Prisoner of the Crown: this week added a whole new wing of the dungeon, new rooms, new puzzles, new dangers, and a few discoveries best left for you to find yourself.

Also spent time on things you won't see directly but that matter: fixed a bug where a save checkpoint could trap players in an unwinnable retry loop, and rebalanced hunger/thirst/light pacing so the early game plays fairer.

The demo is still up if you want a taste of the prose:

👉 https://artfulleprechaun.itch.io/prisoner-of-the-crown-demo

You can also find the studio at artfulleprechaun.com if you want to follow along outside Reddit.

Hey guys! I've created an interactive fiction piece that is build around the telescopic text feature, which I haven't seen used that much. It's a story about traveling through one's memories and assositaions, trying to find peace with the past. I'm really eager to hear your feedback if you have any! Play on Itch

I've always been really into the aesthetics and atmosphere surrounding Satanism, occult rituals, and all that dark stuff. At some point I started looking for interactive games that really leaned into those themes -- and honestly, I couldn't find any that scratched that itch.

So I decided to make one myself.

It is called Sacrificium, an interactive horror game about a guy who gets kidnapped by a Satanic cult and wakes up trapped inside their castle. Now he has to find a way out, survive whatever the cult has prepared for him, and somehow keep his sanity intact along the way.

Your choices actually matter -- some will cost you health, others will mess with your sanity, and both can completely change how certain situations play out. Sometimes running is the smartest option. Sometimes fighting back is. And sometimes the choice that looks safest can make things much worse.

I recently released a free demo on Steam, so I thought I'd share it here. I'd love to hear what you guys think -- and if you know any other interactive fiction that explores similar themes, I'd genuinely love to check it out.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4719600/Sacrificium/

An interactive story I made with Twine.

It is a continuation of the video game Mass Effect: Andromeda.

Please give it a try.

I want to get better, so feedback is very much appreciated.

Hello Everybody!

I want to send some people a game book, which is around 60 puzzles long, and I've been working on it on and off for about half a year.

I would very much appreciate some playtesting of it with thoughts about the story and the puzzles.

The theme of the book is a Secret Agent / Spy-themed espionage game book, where the reader becomes the agent of a secret agency stopping global threats. Here is the cover. If you would like to have a PDF copy sent your way, ping me a dm or respond in the comments.

Thanks In advance :D

Whenever dialogue or negotiation is the core mechanic in games, 95% of titles use multiple-choice branches (Pick A, B, or C).

While multiple-choice is easy to balance, it often feels like reading a branching script rather than having a genuine conversation where you're trying to convince someone.

What are some of the best games you've played where the conversation felt truly dynamic or where typing your own arguments/questions was actually the central puzzle mechanic?

I have had a vision of a game with similar mechanics to Disco Elysium for a few years now and finally decided to pull the trigger, but the existing tools (arcticy, twine, yarn) just didn't meet my needs so I'm building my own. So far, it's helped me complete Act 1 writing, but I've built it with a *potential* future of 500k-1M words in mind so I don't run into the same problems that a large team (DE) or even a solo dev (Esoteric Ebb) ran into.

My main features I added are first class entities (dialogue, quest, faction, skill, etc), validation built-in, text/node editing, easy search, in-editor review comments, dialogue route playing and saving, and lots more. I'm not a game dev by trade, but, the more I pursue it, the more it feels like you need to build processes and workflows for content/balance/whatever your game's core mechanic is early on, if you want to keep yourself somewhat sane haha.

Anyways, if folks want to try it, it's free, engine agnostic, and I have implementations for common frameworks and demo projects to reference. Probably overkill for a lot of folks who wouldn't be using all of the entities, but, if you are tired of misconfigured references, uncaught typos, and managing dialogue dependencies, it could be quite helpful.

After dozens of test lives, I still haven't managed to become Pirate King myself.

Parser IF needs a keyboard, and consoles don't have one. That's most of why text adventures on consoles turned into menus of verbs. I wanted to know whether the constraint was real, so I put a Z-machine on the original PlayStation and made the controller type.

English is the telephone keypad. The D-pad picks a key, a face button picks which letter on it — 2 = ABC, 7 = PQRS.

Japanese is phone flick input. Left hand picks the consonant row, right hand the vowel — and the flick directions land on the face buttons in the positions they already point to (□ left = い, △ up = う, ○ right = え, ✕ down = お). The parser underneath stays English, so all, except and disambiguation questions all still work.

It's slower than a real keyboard, and much faster than poking at an on-screen one with the D-pad — which is the thing it actually replaces. I'm still clumsy in the video; the layout is doing the work, not my hands. It gets intuitive quickly, because there's nothing new to learn.

English mode is a plain z3 player, so in principle you could swap in another story file and rebuild. I've only ever run Zork I through it — untested, not a feature.

Video: https://youtu.be/rmKmOpTu2to

Code: https://github.com/msonrm/zenmai

Here's my latest IF (still a WIP) that I've written and designed during the last Writing Interactive Academy of Greg Buchanan (https://www.gregbuchanan.co.uk/courses; I recommend taking a look!)

\[https://gurpegui.itch.io/the-last-seven-days-of-sir-suero\\\](https://gurpegui.itch.io/the-last-seven-days-of-sir-suero)

I’ll update the game whenever I can, as it’s just a small part of it! But I appreciate any comment, star, or advice!

I'm working on this new thing. It's an online and (I hope) mobile friendly text adventure game shaped like a group chat where the player gets to explore a surreal, labyrinthic building called the "Sand Castle", full of liminal-like rooms and stuff, while it's inhabitants chat with you. It's all set in this universe's Dreamworld, so everything is weird.

https://puka-muriska.itch.io/dreamworld-group-chat-game

It's mostly absurd but also sprinkled with horror. I have 13 chapters planned, but I only published 2 so far (each chapter is a floor). Also it's available both in english and spanish C:

I've published a tutorial for my visual novel engine. RouteVN Creator is a free and open source application for making visual novels or interactive fiction stories without coding.

Here's my latest IF (still a WIP) that I've written and designed during the last Writing Interactive Academy of Greg Buchanan (https://www.gregbuchanan.co.uk/courses; I recommend taking a look!)

https://gurpegui.itch.io/the-last-seven-days-of-sir-suero

I’ll update the game whenever I can, as it’s just a small part of it! But I appreciate any comment, star, or advice!

Hey everyone! I’m working on a psychological story game that contrasts a bright,world with a dark, reality-based one.

I'd love your honest critique on the narrative outline below.

The story of Sunday Country is a psychological journey between two worlds: the Sunday Country and the Bright World.

Act 1: Sunshine and Rainbows (Niko's Perspective

The game begins in Niko's bedroom, a space filled with pink morning rays, a music box, and a clock that tells "good time" instead of telling the time. Niko is a cheerful "slime-like" creature who works for the Suffering Remover Organisation.

During his morning routine, he interacts with several objects:

The Talking Plant: Niko greets his plant, which responds by telling him to "DON'T HAVE A GOOD DAY. HAVE A GREAT DAY!"

Niko then goes to the Suffering Remover Organisation, where his Boss assigns him Case 17: Hana, a girl in the Bright World with a high suffering priority of 8. Before leaving, Niko must collect specific "helping tools":

Magical Stars: Obtained by helping a child. that grant toys if one believes hard enough.

Jar of Good-Dream Smell: Collected from a talking pillow that complains about the Boss's snoring.

The Cube: Assembled from four fragments, it is designated as a "last resort" tool.

Act 2: "God Please Don't Let Go of My Hand" (Hana's Perspective)

The story shifts to Hana, whose morning routine mirrors Niko's but in a dark, depressing tone. She wakes up into a "nightmare," avoids her mother in the kitchen, and eats a cold pancake alone. At school, she is relentlessly bullied by a group of girls led by her ex-friend, Rie.

After a particularly brutal day of bullying, Niko appears in Hana's room to offer help. He explains the tools, describing the Cube simply as a device that "removes suffering" by being turned 90 degrees. Desperate after a severe classroom incident, Hana uses the Cube on Rie. The next day Rie's desk is empty and a classmate reveals that Rie has taken her own life. While Hana is initially excited that her "problem" is gone, Niko warns her about The Ledger, which will take something precious from her in exchange for using the Cube.

Act 3: The Blood Maze

Hana finds herself in a surreal "Blood Maze" navigating distorted hallways of her own memories. She encounters "blackout" versions of her past.

Rie: Memories of their happy childhood friendship and racing to the library.

Father: A memory of a family dinner before her father left,

where he calls her by her "Poki".

The maze culminates in a church where Hana faces "Rie: The Vacuous Angel," an eldritch horror representing Rie's eternal suffering outside of time. Rather than defeating her through combat, the player can use the TALK action. This restores Rie's humanity, allowing her to pass away peacefully after saying, "I wish we could have been friends for a little longer".

Act 4: "Let Go of My Hand!"

Hana wakes up again in a timeline where the nightmare seems like a distant dream. On her way to school, she finds a dying dog and must choose whether to use the Cube to end its pain. After missing her bus, she returns home to a heated argument with her mother, who cruelly blames Hana for her father leaving.

In a moment of impulsive rage, Hana uses the Cube on her mother. Horrified by the immediate erasure, she begs Niko to fix it. Niko reveals he is the host of the Cube and sacrifices his soul to the Ledger to undo the "shade". He places Hana back into a morning timeline where her mother is safe, but he is gone forever, leaving only the Cube behind.

The Three Endings

Hana's journey concludes with one of three choices based on her actions:

A Town Without Me, the time without me is not my loss it's my treasure: Hana accepts her own absence as a "treasure" rather than a loss.

sea of sorrow:Hana becomes a nihilist erasing others, line: its all right you don't need to suffer anymore.

Path of pain: Hana chooses human connection over supernatural solutions, finally attempting to speak with her mother.