As mentioned in a previous post, Varytale is a platform for interactive stories. It’s put together by Ian Millington, the same person who created the Undum tool, but Varytale goes quite a bit further. Writing Tools Undum provides a slick front-end and a way to build a few choices and otherwise leaves everything up to … Continue reading “Writing for Varytale”
So Bee has been out for a couple of days now in reader beta, and my analytics page overflows. The Varytale system includes a mechanism by which readers can rate and comment on any individual piece of the story as they go along, giving a one to five star ranking and displaying the average of … Continue reading “Varytale Analytics”
Varytale is a platform for interactive stories that fall somewhere on the spectrum between stateful CYOA (like Choice of Games) and quality-based narrative (like Echo Bazaar). As you can see from the screenshot, the experience is intentionally booklike and lushly textured. Varytale borrows or improves on the attractive qualities of Undum. There are visible stats … Continue reading “Bee out in Varytale Reader’s Beta”
For those who are interested in the behind-the-scenes details of Varytale, their blog has several detailed new posts, with screenshots.
Events September 1. The yearly IF Comp is now accepting submissions for this fall. If you intend to enter, you should indicate that by September 1 (so tomorrow — though I imagine most people who are planning to enter will already have sent in their intent). Sept 2, the San Francisco Bay Area IF Meetup gets … Continue reading “End of August Links”
A couple days ago I mentioned the rerelease of my game Bee, and promised a follow-up article about some of the technical aspects. The Project Key things to know about the game: You can also play the new Dendry version here. The Challenge Bee was written for Varytale, but that platform went away a long … Continue reading “Rebalancing Bee”
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 