Every choice a player makes (aside from obviously incorrect ones) should be justified by you as an author in some way. Whether it’s an “ah, of course!” or even just a figurative pat on the back–letting them know they made a good choice is always a good thing. Don’t just do what the player wants to do, make them feel good for doing it! Think of what ideas were going through their head, their...

The demo version for my newest interactive adventure is here! Samurai of Hyuga is a brutal, heart-pounding interactive tale. Prepare to enter the land of silk and steel, where fantasy clashes against grim reality, and where the good guys don’t always win in the end. It’s a harsh world with tough choices at every turn. Good thing you’re the toughest ronin around. This demo contains the first four chapters of the story. They are...

In interactive fiction, the protagonist name choice (if it exists) is often a no-brainer. You’ll be shown your gender-appropriate variations of “David” and “Joseph” and “William”, and you’ll probably opt to “enter your own name”. How can we make this choice more meaningful? How can pre-generated names not only have some appeal, but give off information as well? Here are the name choices for my upcoming game: Male Names Akio (昭雄). A name which...

The vast majority of the edits for Fatehaven were not scripting errors or pronoun mistakes. They weren’t second-person perspective missteps either, though I did grow tired of writing “You”! No, they were problems with present tense. Specifically, I naturally wrote in the past. It was a tendency that was hard to avoid even 100k words into the tale. The Wheel of Time, A Game of Thrones, Harry Potter—the books I’ve read and have been...

Wisdom, Charisma, Dexterity. Using numbers to identify our strengths and weaknesses has been around for decades in roleplaying games. Stats in interactive fiction however, is a more recent invention. The choose-your-own-adventure books of the 80s and 90s faced limitations that their current digital counterparts no longer have. And with great power comes, well, lots of choices. With a story written in choicescript or any programming language, you can store variables and test them, create...

Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on. Now, if you ask me, what’s going on is that we’re all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is what we not yell at one another. Otherwise we’d all just be barking away like Pekingese: “Ah! Stuck in the shit! And it’s your fault, you did this…” Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert...