Hey folks,
Here's an overview of interactive fiction tools that I've used in the past, and that you might find useful during the game jam:
This is purely my own personal opinion, your mileage may vary
- Twine
• pros: Simple HTML based interactive fiction tool. Has a really intuitive graph editor for visualizing your story. Very flexible, if you are clever you can build many systems within Twine.
• cons: Hard to do animations, fragmented documentation because of the different story formats, which are basically mini-engines built within Twine.
• Try it if: You're lightly familiar with CSS, want to make something primarily static text/image based. Also if you're going to make something that is heavily branching.
• check out: All of these are honestly great, Depression Quest if you want a specific recommendation https://itch.io/games/made-with-twine
• Get Started: https://twinery.org/wiki/twine2:guide - Inform 7
• pros: Extremely focused on making the classic parser text adventure game. Has many things of the genre already built in, like parsing input, actions (look, move, pick up), rooms, inventory, etc.
• cons: If you're trying to make a mechanical twist on the genre, then it will be quite tricky to get it to work. As someone who is a programmer first, I found the abstractions they used to be very hard to grasp.
• Try it if: You want to make an text adventure game. Really, can't emphasize it enough, it has one purpose only, but I think it is the best tool for that purpose.
• check out: Hunger Daemon http://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifarchive.org%2Fif-archive%2Fgames%2F...
Get Started: http://inform7.com/book/WI_1_1.html - Unity + Fungus
• pros: Fungus is an open source dialogue manager for Unity, so it also has access to EVERYTHING unity has to offer. It has a great node-based system for laying out dialogue.
• cons: Double the learning curve because you have to learn both Unity and Fungus.
• Try it if: You want to incorporate some kind of gameplay mechanic that would be a lot trickier/impossible in the other engines.
• Check out: Good Bot (Student project from a few years ago) https://stanfordstudentgames.itch.io/good-bot
• Get started: https://github.com/snozbot/fungus/wiki - Ren'py
• pros: Open Source desktop visual novel maker that has a great community. Probably the most commercially used out of the 4 here.
• cons: Tricky to make Ren'py games playable on browser/mobile (but RenPyWeb is trying its hardest to make it work).
• Try it if: You want to make a visual novel! Bonus if you're familiar with Python.
• check out: Butterfly Soup https://brianna-lei.itch.io/butterfly-soup
• Get started: https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/quickstart.html - Headkanon
• pros: Mobile-first browser-based visual novel maker with built-in animations and effects. And also, I'm its (solo) developer! I'm looking to spend this game jam improving it, so I will literally be taking feature requests during it haha.
• cons: Super early alpha, so try it out at your own risk. Missing many customization options.
• Try it if: You want to make something small and beginner friendly, with personal guidance. You're okay with trying software that will probably have bugs.
• Check out: The home page has an interactive demo, where you can edit a story and see how it works
• Get started: https://headkanon.com
- If you have any questions about the above, please feel to reply here or DM me on Discord (wonch#7681)! I'll also be talking on the stream tomorrow to show people how to make visual novels with both Ren'py and Headkanon.