Chris

An oddly familiar tale...

A postapocalyptic tale built for Ludum Dare 24

A short math puzzler: Start at 63 and get to 0 by adding or subtracting in increments of 6, 10, 15 or 17, without using any of the red numbers. Satisfying, though it starts out frustrating!

The author hasn't written the description yet!

Based on a hilarious @petermolydeux idea: 5 minute game where you play an asteroid that is headed towards Earth. Everyone hates you. All you can do is talk, what would you say? [Author's page]

Via freeindiegames, a game in the style of the amazing Candy Box. Start out in a dark room, build a fire.

You are a space mechanic. In space. Content is inappropriate at times.

A short demo of link basics. See this post to learn more! Read about StoryLab here.

Trapped on a mysterious island, you must figure out what to do next. The story changes with your choices...

A short story where you play as a vampire and try to survive the night in Tokyo. From the author: This is my first Twine game, an attempt to create a sandbox-style experience. You're a vampire living near Akabane Station in Northern Tokyo (not too far from where I live!) There are a few different endings, though the main goal is simply to survive the night. You could just go out then back to bed if you want! There are several ways to die if you're not careful. It's also impossible to do everything in one night, so you have to replay it to see all the different things you can do. Time passes as you move to different areas. WARNING: It has bad language, (mild) sexual content and graphic violence. You can also stalk and attack people on the street, so potential TRIGGER WARNING!

A story of a day's work.

The author hasn't written the description yet!

This is a story all about seeing through the eyes of someone else and how you face the world, how you endure. It's an interesting, if challenging, read From the author: A game I made about myself and trying to live with things. I still don’t know how I feel about having released it.

Alone in the Park combines story and adventure game in a somewhat endearing way. From the authors: Play as a rather misanthropic gamer who finds herself lured away from her computer to embark upon a real world quest: finding hidden treasure in a national park. Annoyingly, doing this requires her to locate and reassemble pieces of a treasure map. And instead of being populated with cool creatures like giant vampire squid bats or something, the park's forests, lakes and mountains are home to the lamest NPCs imaginable. This treasure had better be fucking legendary.

You are a dinosaur. A dinosaur with an appetite for destruction.

Flappy Bird, reinvented in Twine, made for #flappyjam

A basic swordfighting combat system, integrated into a Twine game. Insults not included.

Mind the gap. A short semi-linear story of love and the beyond.

Unread. “A Grow-like Twine game where you have a single scene and eight verbs that can be performed once in any order.”

A two player story. Play with a friend. Unread.

You are a nomad, on the road with your partner, trying to figure out your where to lay your head next. This is one of the first stories I've seen with a really strong "write your own ending" feeling to it. A cowboy story with a small bit of postapocalyptic twang. The music doesn't hurt either. Via freeindiegam.es

A game about running a Kickstarter. Unread.

A simple don't push the button game. What will you find when you push it? (Because you will.) Article on Rock Paper Shotgun: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/07/02/every-decision-you-make-is-an-abomination-button-roulette/

You are the Candy Ant Princess! After a cozy childhood as an (adorable) jelly larvae, you have emerged from your cell-cocoon as a fully formed Queen. From Rock Paper Shotgun: Running a candy ant colony is hard work. Will you raise your daughters to war or peace? Who can you trust in the ruthless environment of Strawberry Swirl Forest?

Space horror/humor for Ludum Dare 30

Created by Senior Lecturer Carolyn Price at Open University, this story explores key issues in philosophy. From the author's description: From bickering birds to scary monsters, choose your quest and find your way out of the castle. There are nine chapters exploring key questions in philosophy and it will take approximately 30-60 minutes to complete your adventure. As you navigate through the story, the game will build up an idea of how you feel about these questions, and at the end of the game you'll receive an analysis of your choices and a map of how your opinions compare to different philosophers through the ages.

Starts from a poem by Thomas Wyatt

Connection doesn't have any branches in it, but I wanted to include it because it's mostly text and quite dynamic. Connection tells a story in the form of internet conversation between Ben and Zoe. If you've ever played Christine Love's Digital: A Love Story, you'll recognize the homages to vintage online communication (1988 BBSes vs. 2005 BlogSpot). From the author: I’ve known her now, what, the last four or five years? The technology, it’s improved leaps and bounds. I mean, sometimes so rapidly, I wonder whether we know where or when we’ll stop racing forward with our phones and laptops raised to the skies. I wonder. And, yet, we’re still limited to exchanging our words to connect. Those words we sent out across wires and satellites across time zones and oceans blindly hoping they would reach a pulse at the other end the pulse we could know but not feel the person we could see but not touch. And I wonder if we’ve ever really known each other. I wonder whether we’ve really connected.

Conversations is a mad lib style note from Merritt's mother, which very succinctly explores the feelings of dealing with family and gender identity simultaneously. Ed. I think we need to add an autobiographical tag Via freeindiegam.es

From the story: In 1987, an anonymous team of computer scientists from the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic wrote a series of children's books based on the popular Choose Your Own Adventure series. The books were hastily translated into English and a small number were exported to America, but the CIA, fearing a possible Soviet mind control scheme, confiscated them all before they could be sold. Now declassified, the books have been lovingly converted to a digital hypertext format and put online for the English-speaking world to enjoy. What follows is the second book in the "You Will Select a Decision" series: Cow Farming Activities on the Former West.

Can you squeeze in one game of CS: GO before visitors arrive? CS STORY is currently in beta.

A sample story from Adventure Cow!

It sounds morosely blithe, and it is morose, but it's also deeply meaningful. Depression Quest pulled me into the reality of depression in a way that no other story has really been able to do before. From the authors: Depression Quest is an interactive fiction game where you play as someone living with depression. You are given a series of everyday life events and have to attempt to manage your illness, relationships, job, and possible treatment. This game aims to show other sufferers of depression that they are not alone in their feelings, and to illustrate to people who may not understand the illness the depths of what it can do to people. From RPS: Mostly Indescribable: Depression Quest

This is a tech demo of a fight in DestinyQuest versus an advanced opponent, the Minorian. It exactly copies the fight here in PDF form, with the same advanced abilities and items.

Welcome! We're pleased to present our SECOND demo from DestinyQuest Infinite: The Act 3 quest "The Warning." (If you haven't played DestinyQuest before, we recommend starting with the Act 1 demo.) Much like the Act I demo, this is a full quest from the book. However, unlike that demo, this is a more advanced quest - featuring more equipment, a much longer path, a little more back story, and a lot more action. Act 1 demo: Click here to play Support: Email us at questforge@adventurecow.com Get DestinyQuest Infinite here: dqinfinite.com

Welcome! We're pleased to present a free DEMO of DestinyQuest Infinite. DQI is based on a gamebook by Michael Ward. The full game is a Choose Your Own Adventure-style novel with over 600 pages and hundreds of weapons and other items. Check out DestinyQuest Infinite here, at dqinfinite.com. If you encounter any problems, try refreshing the page! If that doesn’t help, send us an email at support@adventurecow.com. Thanks! SUPPORTED BROWSERS: Firefox, Chrome, and IE when it feels like it. Mobile support still in development.

A story about moving on. Highly recommended via freeindiegames. From the author: Detritus is a Twine game & formal experiment by @newsmary. It is a work of fiction inspired by real-life experiences.

A story about the choices we make. Most interactive stories are about what you do - make peace, make love, make war - but End Boss is about why. Quick but interesting story. Commentary from the author

A sci-fi mix of humor and text adventure game parody. Bits of it were fun, though it could've used more writing from the author. Now with achievements!

Warning: Quite inappropriate, and occasionally rude and raunchy. I think Christine puts it best when she wrote her description: This week, I spent the day making a game in Twine called Even Cowgirls Bleed. Warning: I was not feeling great that day. An entertaining, if somewhat dark and inappropriate, (mostly) non-interactive quasi-Western tale of a girl from the big city. Recommended by Porpentine.

By Jonathan Xikis The tale of a girl who wins a contest, with unforseen consequences... We're actively working on updating this story. A new version with lots more story, features, gameplay, and color art is coming!

An amusing parody of the Fallen London games. Practically better than the real thing! From the author's description: 2014. Three days ago, Swindon was stolen by dyslexic bats who are in spectacular trouble with the Masters of the Bazaar right now. What a bloody awful way to start the week. But, what’s done is done and can’t be fixed, apparently. Good thing Swindoners can get used to anything…

Ever want to play a dating sim as the characters being played? You know you have! Be the dated in this short but amusing story. Made for Ludum Dare #25.

The story takes place in an alternate 1788 France, where the nobles have the power of magic. A story where you rewrite the correspondence of Juliette, her husband Henri, and the others in the story. The fascinating thing about this approach is that this is basically a game about writing - you recompose the story and explore different parts through that rewriting. Worth reading. From the description: Juliette has been banished for the summer to a village above Grenoble: a few Alpine houses, a deep lake, blue sky, and no society. Now she writes daily to her husband. She tells how she went for a walk and ended thigh-deep in mud, how the draft comes in around the window, how extravagantly she has spent on new gloves, how she misses Paris. She plans her letters on ordinary pages, but when they are ready, she copies them on paper whose enchanted double is hundreds of miles off. The words form themselves on the matching sheaf in her husband's study. No time is wasted on couriers.

Twine is a remarkably adaptable instrument. With it, even complex game mechanics can be reduced to simple, intuitive, text. Sometimes. This is a first person shooter. As a text adventure. It's rather silly.

Do a feather and a stone fall at the same speed? What about a heavier and a lighter stone? A demonstration of using StoryLab to make a learning game, made in a few hours. (Of course, you don't have to limit your games to experiments you can do at home!) Read more about StoryLab here.

You are out to dig. But for what, exactly? While this is mostly linear story, the interactions make it fun to play with. Via freeindiegam.es

From the author: Make your way down into the catacombs of Castle Hallowmoor and see if you've got the guts to make it out alive! Originally on intfiction.org.

A remake of a game made in 1970. Description from freeindiegam.es: While you are walking down a dusty, deserted side street Black Bart emerges from a Saloon one hundred paces away. By agreement, you each have four cartridges in your six-guns. Your marksmanship equals his. At the start of the walk, neither of you can possibly hit the other, and at the end of the walk, neither can miss. The closer you get, the better your chances of hitting Bart, but he also has better chances of hitting you.

I've started to read enough of Porpentine's stories that I've started to recognize one of her styles, at least between this and /All I want is for all of my friends to become insanely powerful/: densely worded, brutal repetition. howling dogs lives in the near-future, an endless set of lives in a hermetic chamber. Entered in the 18th Annual IF Comp. Lots of write-up here.

Author's description: Hypnagogue is an interactive fiction horror game where the protagonist awakes one night to discover their bedroom has been transmogrified and devoured by a strange, otherworldly maze. [Via TwineHub]

The author hasn't written the description yet!

Unread. From freeindiegam.es. The very first sentence: "When I was a young girl, I was a member of the Boy Scouts." Semi-biographical.

Humorous parody of old NES games about taking on a colony of SPACE BEES. Via freeindiegames. Author's description: A video game about space bees.

A short demo of macro basics. See this post to learn more! Read about StoryLab here.

An ambitious and sprawling hyperfiction paired with the book of the same name. Have yet to read this one. :)

Journey through a haunting, empty city...in search of who knows what. Inspired by a picture by zdzisław beksiński.

Unread.

You are trapped on a train car, with just your wits and a trusty Orb of Hydration. What will you do?

While we were at #PlaycraftingNYC, Yuliya and Chris started dashing off a quick game...about being at #PlayCraftingNYC. All the specific games and developers we name were made up by us - all the REAL games can be found in the link at the end of the story. Thanks to Adam for making the silly Xbox comment in the elevator.

A short story about exploring a spooky castle. Plenty of ways to die, CYOA-style! From IndieGames.com

Author's description: QUID is a text-based adventure game that I created as part of a team in university for a module on the Psychology of Design, where we were given the task of creating a piece of narrative-driven interactive fiction that focused on a topic of our choosing from the field of Games for Learning or Games for Health. We chose to create an interactive story exploring the topic of Queer Identity in a way that was meaningful, relevant, helpful and engaging for 13-17 year olds.

A strange stream-of-consciousness journey, part parody, part wackiness. "Rat Chaos is the funniest Twine game I’ve ever played, and the most human." -From Porpentine's original review (Featured on indiegam.es and Rock Paper Shotgun 8/12/2012)

A short and sweet "speculative romance" by the creator of Twine, Chris Klimas, Remembered is a tale that's interesting to read, and mostly linear, with brief hypertext forays in to the protagonist's cloudy past. The visual style is appealing, with a plain page and text. Remembered is one of a set of stories written by Klimas, posted publicly at gimcrackd.com.

Based on S. John Ross's Risus RPG, Ring of Thieves is a short but exciting adventure where a thief named Lucas must rescue his companion after an ambushed by a band only recognizable by their gray cloaks. The writing and characterization really drew me into the story. Recommended. Also mentioned in: Play This Thing!

A wild game where you are a sound engineer. How do I set the preamp? Who are the Simian Motor Stranglers? Should I really be using a condenser mic for a snare drum? Do they still use phantom power? What's phantom power? What am I doing? Where's the Taco Bell? (Might actually teach you a bit about being a sound engineer.) From the author's description: Rookie Recording is a Twine game that I created this summer. It’s a video game about street cred, microphones, late night Taco Bell cravings, analog signal flow, unreadable brutal lettering, and an Electronic Talking Sir George Martin Super-Producer® action figure (still in it’s original packaging).

A demo story for StoryLab

Unfortunately I can’t describe the game in detail without saying things which should remain unsaid. - [Author's description]

From the author: shimmering caverns: a weird autobiographical metaphorical thing my first twine there are seven endings

Entered in IFComp 2013. From the author's description: The year is 1954. One year after mutually assured destruction. And I am trying to find you, through memory and alchemy. Not many people know how the nuclear devastation really happened. But we do.

A brief game about an interplanetary voyage.

A story about a haunting. Author's description: HELLO!! i have missed you. I wrote a new thing, it is a story about a world full of DEAD PEOPLE. you PLAY as such a dead person and it is your job to HAUNT THE LIVINGGgggg. I hope you enjoy itt!! the setting is onE that has been in my head for some tiiime now and I may use it agaAAAIInnn. I hope you ENJOY ITT!!! (ps there are TWO(2) ENDINGS)

You and your brother have been reunited after a long period of growing apart. Great power comes with a great price... From the author: Swan Hill is an interactive story about brothers who have grown apart. It has multiple endings.

From author's description: 'Thawed' - originally made for the Global Game Jam 2011 The year is 2011. Global Warming is slowly melting the polar ice caps. Polar Bears are on the brink of extinction and their last hope lies in the ability of the males to quickly and efficiently mate. However, the female polar bears have grown scarce, and increasingly wary. Against all odds, you, a faded, aging, male Polar Bear must set out to find one such female and birth a continued life into your dying species. </blockquote>

A short but tricky sci-fi adventure aboard a mysterious ship. Discovering how the crystals work is just the beginning of your adventure... Review on Clavis Cryptica: link

You're a new detective, on the lookout for a real mystery. A lady reports her jewelry's been stolen, and a couple of alligators are missing from the zoo. What will you do?

Note: There's quite a bit of writing here already, but this is an introduction and first draft, meant to be for a longer project. See author's note. Once abandoned after a terrible plague, the White City is now home to a new utopian vision and a new generation of inhabitants, and you're one of them. Explore shops and find your way around this new world. From the author: “Sixty years after it was abandoned the White City has been taken under the wing of a new development collective. They’ve remade the city into an urban paradise and beacon of social change with digital currency, urban food forests, and a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence with enough power to run the city for a thousand years. Her name is Edyn and there’s just one problem; they need to test her. Lured by the promise of fame and fortune, the most notorious hackers in the world are invited to come to the new city to test their skills against the ai program and prove whether or not utopia can really exist.”

By Chan Sing Goh The Empire's Edge was the winner of a Merit Award in the Windhammer Gamebook competition from 2014. This isn't a full example, but rather a showcase of how to make a gamebook fully digital using StoryLab. You can read the print gamebook here.

Someone made Harvest Moon in Twine!! It looks a little messy at first, but it's quite engaging (and really impressive) once you get into it.

Beware the faulty pixels! A short adventure in hardware diagnosis.

A short and to the point biographical sketch where you struggle with deep social anxiety and gender identity.

In 2015, the New Horizons probe reached Pluto. Days later, they arrived. A brief science fiction story.

By Paul Struth The Sacrifice was the winner of the Windhammer Gamebook competition from 2014. This isn't a full example, but rather a showcase of how to make a gamebook fully digital using StoryLab. You can play the actual game here.

Author's description: a twine game about what i imagine #sxsw to be like based on never having been Via

"So you're in this dungeon, right? And the thing about dungeons is you gotta start on the top and work your way down to the bottom." A funny and very hypothetical dungeon crawler.

An RPG made in Twine. Download and run; will have to host a version at some point. From the author: One day I'm like "could I make an RPG using twine and some Unicode square charachters to make an overworld? and what if it were like "The Walking Dead? but terrible?" And that's what this is.

What every tour of campus should be like. Features occasional forays into fantasy, pictures, and the memories of nostalgic college students.

A showcase of art and sound. It's more of an interactive experience than a game or story, so sit back and enjoy the visuals and music.

Unread. Appears to be a sort of interactive free verse poem.

A game-novella set in near future Minneapolis.

Surrealist adventure. There's something about Twine that makes people make really weird, but interesting games. "made in a day or so for the salt world jam. based heavily on the good bits of david lynch’s ‘lost highway’" -Author's description " a bleak, squiggly, MS Painted nightmare of filthy unemployment versus sterile consumerism" -Porpentine, Rock Paper Shotgun