NaNoWriMo Text Adventures

[squirmelia]

NaNoWriMo starts soon, and as I've been reading Twisty Little Passages, I'm vaguely contemplating writing some kind of interactive fiction/text adventure type thing for it.

[Poll #1474777]

Comments

[fridgemagnet.livejournal.com]

I thought about this last year, as I toy with writing IF a lot, mostly in Inform. I still think it would be an interesting idea but I'm not sure I would use the standard text adventure format, just because it makes it very hard to get the word count; you're having to think all the time about the relationship between all of your descriptions and the objects that they represent, and code them too. Unless it's a very boring piece of IF.

One thing I *might* suggest, though, is a more choose-your-own-adventure style of IF, along the lines of Japanese "dating sim" style RPGs - I did some research on the systems for those recently. Technically known as "visual novels". There is a package called Ren'Py (http://www.renpy.org/wiki/renpy/Home_Page) which is very straightforward to write in, and while it assumes you'll want to have graphics involved, you don't have to.

I think this would make it a lot easier to get the word count down as you can effectively write a standard novel and put a bit of plot branching in it. Some people write "kinetic novels" in the format which aren't interactive at all.

[fridgemagnet.livejournal.com]

in fact if you don't do this, I might, or even if you do

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

You definitely should!

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, I had a look at visual novels recently. I quite like the idea of them. Maybe I could do a combination of things - a text adventure, a visual novel, and a more standard novel type bit (apparently text adventures sometimes come with books), depending how my word count is going? 555 words of each a day wouldn't be too bad, and I don't care too much about it all being strictly the same novel.

Ren'Py looks useful.. thanks for the suggestion!