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#interactivefiction

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In a month that remains till the start of my new university, I like to start writing interactive fiction with #twine. I know it takes longer than a month but at least writing a beginning for a dark story will be a good plan! I know I did not do any of my plans in the past but I really like to finish this one!
#interactivefiction

Continued thread

Back in #bureaucracy on the #commodore #c64:
We are starting to get hungry. Luckily there is a fast food restaurant. The ordering process is obviously extremely tedious and error prone. We somehow still manage to order something, but have no cash, only our credit cards. This is no good. We grab our burger and make a beeline through the back door into the alley.
#interactivefiction

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@pablo_fernandez thanks for asking 🤓

I'm working on a way to express narratives and cause-and-effect for a narrative based adventure game I'm envisioning with my partner. Basically trying to get away from basic dialogue trees and purely reactive narrative scripting, without giving up on authorial intent.

What I came up with is a sort of behavior tree pattern but dynamic. Meaning, the trees get modified at runtime based on other behaviors, triggers, and behavior contexts (the name I gave to self-contained behavior trees, such as a dialogue or other complex interaction that is only valid as long as the actor is not distracted from it). The system has to be able to manage actor types, a large number of individual actors, and many complex, interconnected behaviors that are often unique to an actor or a group of actors. Editor plugins are necessary and so on. It's inspired by some #InteractiveFiction techniques by Emily Short that I've read about but real-time interactive.

I got relatively far with GDScript and an autoload, but I was running into difficult and annoying bugs because I had to keep actor identifiers unique and consistent in several places. Getting all the signals wired up correctly, managing scripts, accessing pieces of the world state, persistence, and so on got difficult almost immediately, and I hadn't even implemented triggers or off-scene behaviors yet. I don't know how to do unit tests for GDScript. It was clearly not going to scale.

I decided instead to try to express this pattern with a custom server in an engine module. This server will manage the world narrative state, register the actors in the world and manage their behaviors, interactions, interaction contexts, triggers, etc. I have a long long way to go because I need to learn how Godot servers work, not to mention learn C++ and finish working out the pattern details...

the panelists for Interactive Fiction: Video Game Storytellers

There’s more space under the umbrella of interactive fiction than I knew, coming from the Zork corner of that universe.

I’ve been a fan of the puzzle-style games as long as I can remember. I always keep a bunch of Andrew Plotkin’s games (and other authors) in Frotz on my phone for spare moments.

The panelists’ advice for getting started was simple: try writing a choose your own adventure game in Twine. Just give it a try!

They highlighted an excellent example of modern interactive fiction: The Writer Will Do Something.

No one mentioned MUDs, MOOs, and other multiplayer text-based games. Maybe those games are not literate enough? 🤔

Justin Bortnick, Tina Connolly, Langley Hyde, Andrew Plotkin, Stephen Grande