# Custom Interactive Fiction - Any Market For 'Em?



## Faustus (Oct 3, 2019)

I've recently been getting back into writing Interactive Fiction - AKA text adventures. You know, those old-school games where it's all text and you type commands to do things, like 'Go East' and 'Get Box' and 'Poke Elderly Grandmother with Rusty Champagne Corkscrew', that kind of thing.

I have a side-project that I work on occasionally (a NSFW Furry puzzle-romance-adventure kind of story) and I've done quite a lot of customisation work to make many different commands possible. I intend to release it incrementally at some point, once I've got to a stage where there's a bit more content. In the meantime though, *I was wondering if people think there's any market for custom IF?
*
I don't mind what genre and I'm flexible on NSFW stuff (although I will veto some of the more severe fetishes, especially cubby stuff and scat which both freak me out!) I use Inform, which supports a great many different platforms.

Any (polite) comments, questions or suggestions are welcome!

(p.s. I'm putting this here, rather than in the video gaming section, because IF is closer to literature than modern games, and I'm offering to write to order, not just discussing stuff that's already available.)


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## RoboticFreeze (Oct 3, 2019)

Market as for buying? I don't think so, but there is a lot games like that, so people playing them


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## Seraphon (Oct 7, 2019)

I'd be quite interested in something like that.


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## ConorHyena (Oct 7, 2019)

I doubt there's a market. most interactive fiction I have read so far is slightly cheesy and pretty predictable. I'd rather enjoy a nice story.


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## Faustus (Oct 7, 2019)

ConorHyena said:


> I doubt there's a market. most interactive fiction I have read so far is slightly cheesy and pretty predictable. I'd rather enjoy a nice story.


Heh, funny, most of the Furry Fandom stories I've read I found cheesy and predictable 

Regardless of the media, you'll always get good and bad examples. I've not played much IF recently, but I remember some good ones in the past. The ones made by Yahtzee as a prequel to his 'Seven Days a Sacrifice' were pretty good. It's also worth keeping an eye on the various IF competitions to see who wins those. Some are better than others, but there's usually one or two gems in there.


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## ConorHyena (Oct 7, 2019)

Faustus said:


> Heh, funny, most of the Furry Fandom stories I've read I found cheesy and predictable
> 
> Regardless of the media, you'll always get good and bad examples. I've not played much IF recently, but I remember some good ones in the past. The ones made by Yahtzee as a prequel to his 'Seven Days a Sacrifice' were pretty good. It's also worth keeping an eye on the various IF competitions to see who wins those. Some are better than others, but there's usually one or two gems in there.



True, you have a point there, I'm not arguing there are only bad examples.

Thing is, you're trying to sell a type of content to someone. Selling stories/writing is already damn hard, much harder than visual art, and the IF would be even more niche.


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## Jackpot Raccuki (Oct 7, 2019)

Can we name the character Zoosmell Pooplord? (I will be happy if you get the reference.)

Joke aside, assuming you got it at least, I want to say the market for them is... Well I'd have to do some digging, but I want to assume no, there isn't much market, but doesn't mean it won't pick up if it's good.



ConorHyena said:


> I doubt there's a market. most interactive fiction I have read so far is slightly cheesy and pretty predictable. I'd rather enjoy a nice story.


Sadly that seems to be a common trope, they're often predictable and it ends up becoming meh... It's why I stopped purposely looking for furry interactive fiction.
Plus my favoruite ones have artist that kinda just stopped working on it and went to do other stuff. :c


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## Faustus (Oct 7, 2019)

ConorHyena said:


> ...and the IF would be even more niche.


Yeah, that's definitely true. A bit of a shame in some respects because I've read both good and bad furry fiction. Totally tangentially, I've always gotten the impression that the vast majority of art requests was for reference sheets rather than scenes. I don't know how close that would be to the truth if someone actually cared enough to run the figures though - it's a subjective impression.



Smexy Likeok4 said:


> It's why I stopped purposely looking for furry interactive fiction.


Got any examples? I've played a fair bit of IF over the years, but never anything that was overtly Furry.


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## ConorHyena (Oct 7, 2019)

Faustus said:


> Totally tangentially, I've always gotten the impression that the vast majority of art requests was for reference sheets rather than scenes. I don't know how close that would be to the truth if someone actually cared enough to run the figures though - it's a subjective impression.


It's an impression, but if we're talking about commissioned art, usually a person commissions a ref sheet once and then commissions art with it, therefor, logically, there must be more scene art than ref sheets. What you're propably seeing is people making adopts and marketing them.

But even then we have to assume the people buying the adopt will commission art wiht that ref sheet as well.


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## Faustus (Oct 7, 2019)

ConorHyena said:


> It's an impression, but if we're talking about commissioned art, usually a person commissions a ref sheet once and then commissions art with it, therefor, logically, there must be more scene art than ref sheets.


Well, that wouldn't necessarily hold true. A person may order a ref sheet, then draw their character themselves from that sheet. They might buy the sheet and become disillusioned with the character before they have the money or inclination to buy more art. They might pay for a ref sheet then solicit all their other artwork as freebies or talent swaps. Lots of stuff could happen.

I don't generally look at 'selling' posts because I'm not buying, so I doubt that adopts have anything to do with it.

In any case we're drifting off on a tangent


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## Sariia (Oct 7, 2019)

I've sold interactive fiction before and it was received well-ish, but it's not something I'd probably do without charging more than my normal commissions at this point, because I find it somewhat repetitive when you write several 'what ifs' that vary only slightly from different decisions.


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## Faustus (Oct 8, 2019)

Sariia said:


> I find it somewhat repetitive when you write several 'what ifs' that vary only slightly from different decisions.


What language were you using?

I've generally managed to avoid the worse of repetitive coding by using Inform7, which supports a hierarchic class system. This means you don't have to duplicate tests and responses in child objects unless they should act differently from the parent. You can avoid a lot of stuff like that with adaptive text or some canny architecture.


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## Sariia (Oct 8, 2019)

I didn't code it, I used a pre-build program that builds those interactive stories based on you writing the separate paths! I moreso meant the writing the x different choices from one different scenario felt repetitive after a while.


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## Faustus (Oct 9, 2019)

Ah that sounds like a choose-your-own adventure style thing, where the story diverges based on multiple choice questions, right?

The kind I write is more of the 'go west, eat fruit, light candle' variety.


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