Looking to start making interactives

[MentholBreakdown]

Hi! I'm looking to start writing interactive stories on this site, but unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea how to do that. I would really appreciate some quick tips on how to make an interactive story in the first place & maybe a bit of advice on how to write them.

[Trebortron3]

I've not written interactives on this site before, though I'm a fan of playing through them and am making a rather large one on Twine currently (now at over 300,000 words).

My main piece of advice would be to try to start small and finish the most obvious sets of choices first. Nothing puts me off an interactive quicker than being presented with eight different options and finding that the first three I try haven't been written yet. I'd much rather only be given two options and have them be fleshed out rather than a whole load that are unfinished.

In terms of how to make an interactive story in the first place, I recommend having some clear gimmick that new players can immediately understand (eg. "You find yourself shrunken and wake up in an enchanted forest", "You're an oppressed underclass and one day the government announce that it's legal to eat people like you", "You're a mad scientist and you run a laboratory specialising in making vore a reality" etc. Then make your first sets of options obvious. If you want more subtle or bizarre routes, you can add those later. Think what most players might be interested in exploring (within your interests/world) and flesh that out for starters.

Final point is to try to avoid long strings of single option paths. Single options are fine occasionally, but they vastly lower replayability value and having too many of them defeats the purpose of an interactive story. Choice is key, even if there are only two options available.

Hope this helps as a starting point!

[MentholBreakdown]

Thanks a lot! This is really helpful! However, what I was trying to ask for wasn't necessarily writing tips, I would just like to know where the fuck I have to go on this site to write an interactive lmao

[Trebortron3]

Ahah, sorry, I actually can't help much with that!

If you're willing to go off-site for it, though, Twine and Quest are both pretty good systems for making interactive stories.

[MentholBreakdown]

Can you use them from mobile? I don't have access to my computer at the moment

[Aleph-Null]

Go here and scroll all the way to the bottom.

[Nikkidafox]

I certainly hope that your interactive goes somewhere! Lord knows we have more than enough interactives that are 3 pages long then just get abandoned.

[GeneralKenobi420]

I certainly hope that your interactive goes somewhere! Lord knows we have more than enough interactives that are 3 pages long then just get abandoned.

there should be a petition to delete the ones that are just filling the space, abandoned more than 6 months at this point

[TETRO]

I'm currently in the middle of building a large interactive in Twine. You will likely need a computer to use it. I don't know of a way to use Twine on a phone, though I could just be wrong about that. I prefer it to Quest because it can be run a simple web browser rather than needing its own software. Quest games also have a tendency to crash in the middle of a session. However, if you want something that's more of a game and less of an interactive story, Quest has more built-in features for that.

The problem with public interactive like the ones you see on this site or Writing.com is that they can vary wildly in quality. You have various random writers coming in and either taking it in directions that don't make sense, or adding completely broken chapters. If you want a good interactive, you've got to keep it private and only allow contributors who you trust.

[MentholBreakdown]

I certainly hope that your interactive goes somewhere! Lord knows we have more than enough interactives that are 3 pages long then just get abandoned.

I hope so too! I figured out how to startnow. I'm writing kind of sporadically, but I try to keep it going. Here's a link to it if you'd like to try it or write some of it yourself https://aryion.com/iss/page.php?story=1253&page=1

I'll try to keep the updates going at a reasonable pace