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I made ChoiceScript, a DSL for writing interactive novels in the style of choose-a-path gamebooks, but longer, richer, and deeper. https://www.choiceofgames.com

I made ChoiceScript, a DSL for writing interactive novels in the style of choose-a-path gamebooks, but longer, richer, and deeper. https://www.choiceofgames.com/make-your-own-games/choicescript-intro/ https://www.choiceofgames.com/make-your-own-games/choicescri... The goal was to build a language simple enough that we could teach it to non-coder authors, to scale up the number of interactive novels we could publish. It seems to be working. ChoiceScript is the core of our business; we're profitable with a staff of four editors, a production assistant, plus me, the main tech person. We've found that ChoiceScript makes it easier to teach writers to code than it is to teach coders how to write.

spencerflem 10y ago
Out of curiosity, what's your opinion of Squiffy?
- dfabulich 10y ago
  I haven't used Squiffy myself. There are a lot of tools out there to let you build interactive fiction, either parser-based games where you type your actions, or choice-based games where you choose what you want to do from a list. For many people learning to code, building a tool like this is literally their second program, right after "hello world." Building a full-blown "Choose Your Own Adventure" is one of the tutorial projects in "JavaScript for Kids for Dummies." The most popular type of choice-based IF is hypertext IF, and the most popular tool for building hypertext IF is Twine. Squiffy is most directly a Twine competitor, but almost all hypertext IF is developed in Twine; nobody's using Squiffy. That may not be Squiffy's fault. Generally speaking, IF tools rise above the noise when someone writes a Great Game in that tool, regardless of whether the tool is strictly better or worse than anybody else's tool. Then people who admire the game say, "I want to make a game like that! How did you make it?" and that gets the ball rolling. Since Twine is more popular than Squiffy, I'd advocate that anybody starting today use Twine. (And so the rich get richer.) We don't use Twine or Squiffy at Choice of Games, partly because Twine isn't very well suited to writing really large interactive novels, (our minimum is 100,000 words of code+text) but also because hypertext UI isn't that easy to use on mobile devices; it can be hard to accurately tap on links in the text, as opposed to tapping big buttons at the end of the text. (You can use buttons in place of links in Twine, but you start fighting the tool pretty quickly.)

spencerflem 10y ago

Out of curiosity, what's your opinion of Squiffy?

dfabulich 10y ago
I haven't used Squiffy myself. There are a lot of tools out there to let you build interactive fiction, either parser-based games where you type your actions, or choice-based games where you choose what you want to do from a list. For many people learning to code, building a tool like this is literally their second program, right after "hello world." Building a full-blown "Choose Your Own Adventure" is one of the tutorial projects in "JavaScript for Kids for Dummies." The most popular type of choice-based IF is hypertext IF, and the most popular tool for building hypertext IF is Twine. Squiffy is most directly a Twine competitor, but almost all hypertext IF is developed in Twine; nobody's using Squiffy. That may not be Squiffy's fault. Generally speaking, IF tools rise above the noise when someone writes a Great Game in that tool, regardless of whether the tool is strictly better or worse than anybody else's tool. Then people who admire the game say, "I want to make a game like that! How did you make it?" and that gets the ball rolling. Since Twine is more popular than Squiffy, I'd advocate that anybody starting today use Twine. (And so the rich get richer.) We don't use Twine or Squiffy at Choice of Games, partly because Twine isn't very well suited to writing really large interactive novels, (our minimum is 100,000 words of code+text) but also because hypertext UI isn't that easy to use on mobile devices; it can be hard to accurately tap on links in the text, as opposed to tapping big buttons at the end of the text. (You can use buttons in place of links in Twine, but you start fighting the tool pretty quickly.)