Darkness [Interactive Fiction]

Because less is more: Noncommercial games of < 1 hour playtime and < 2 month development time.
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Der Tor
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Posts: 513
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Completed: Der Totengräber, There is always a Choice, Darkness
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Darkness [Interactive Fiction]

#1 Post by Der Tor »

I initially posted this in the WiP main category, but I feel it fits better here.

I have used Ren'Py for more than a decade now, but I felt I wanted to try and focus more on the story and on the branching than on cutesy anime style graphics and interfaces, so after some brainstorming in the "Other Visual Novel Engines" section of the forum, I decided to try Twine, which is perfect for the kind of dark and text heavy and choice heavy and heavily branching story I had in mind. And since the Twine forums focus mainly on technical questions, rather than WiP threads for individual games, I hope it's okay if I post it here, even though I am not using Ren'Py this time.

The story basically revolves around the protagonist not remembering who or where he is and waking up in the basement of a house. You have to make your way to the top floor (each room is a teensy bit like an escape room with you having to figure out how to get to the next room - but don't worry, you don't have to pick up or combine items or anything like that - there is no gameplay other than just making choices). And of course there is also a central story that takes the foreground as you progress and realize that you are essentially trapped in the house, so you have to figure out a way to leave and in doing so you discover your character's background and who he is and what his past is and the reason why he is trapped in the house in the first place.

The game is obviously inspired by me being in lock down :-)
And also me having had Coronavirus symptoms - so that lead me to reflect on my life and a lot of existential questions - which then lead to me writing this story.

The game is about 60% done, but those 60% you can already play/read. (Screenshots would serve little use, since it's all text)

Twine just puts out an HTML file, which I can't upload to the forum, so instead I now just simply uploaded it to my server: http://visual-novel.de/darkness.html
Please give me some feedback and tell me about any errors or problems you encounter.
Last edited by Der Tor on Mon May 17, 2021 4:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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drinkerofmilk
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Re: Darkness [Interactive Fiction]

#2 Post by drinkerofmilk »

Cool game, it manages to do a lot with the minimalist user interface.

Will the story branch into different directions? Or is it mostly linear?

I may have found a typo: 'mudd' should be 'mud

Der Tor
Miko-Class Veteran
Posts: 513
Joined: Sun Jul 15, 2007 9:03 pm
Completed: Der Totengräber, There is always a Choice, Darkness
Projects: A Legend of an Ancient Evil
itch: emmanuel-goldstein
Location: Hinter dir
Contact:

Re: Darkness [Interactive Fiction]

#3 Post by Der Tor »

Yeah, the entire idea is to make it... well... I hope I am not giving too much away by saying that... but the entire original idea was to not only make it branching, but to kinda have what you think is happening actually influence what is happening. So like if you think there must be another exit, you might find another exit, if you think it's all just a dream, it might turn out to all just be a dream and so on. But of course there is also gonna be a true ending, but that's gonna be hard to find. And actually all those different paths that I just mentioned already exist and you can already find them and go on them - it's just that you can't go them to the end yet, but they are all already there - including the first few steps of the path leading to the true ending...

Der Tor
Miko-Class Veteran
Posts: 513
Joined: Sun Jul 15, 2007 9:03 pm
Completed: Der Totengräber, There is always a Choice, Darkness
Projects: A Legend of an Ancient Evil
itch: emmanuel-goldstein
Location: Hinter dir
Contact:

Re: Darkness [Interactive Fiction]

#4 Post by Der Tor »

Finally after a year I made another update!

So don't worry, I haven't forgotten about finishing the story and actually it's ALMOST finished now!

I also posted it on Itch now: https://emmanuel-goldstein.itch.io/dark ... ve-fiction


PS: I just realized that because I took a break for a year, the development time is now longer than 2 months. But I didn't really do anything in that time, so I guess the actual development time is still less than 2 months :-)

Also, even though it's all text, here is a screenshot :-)
Screenshot from 2021-05-18 00-37-35.png

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