One of the first times I ever really joined in with a weight gain community was on writing.com on those cool interactive stories, before they decided to basically make anything impossible to read if you were so much as to exist for a minute (except for the first 3 chapters, of course). The first interactive I had encountered was The Curse of the Lipomancer, and after that I had branched out to others, but always returned to that one the most. Either way, its ease of ability to contribute to a story and watch it develop as others added to it was honestly kinda fun. Seeing how the story went when selecting one option and then later being able to go back and read through all of the possibilities just made it fun.
Either way, Iāve never been code savvy enough to start an elaborate project, but Iām also not exactly active enough to contribute to other projects (I have a tendency to vanish for a month or so at a time), so Writing provided the perfect environment to contribute something every now and again.
Does anyone know of any alternatives to Writing that either allow the creation of interactive chapters and/or the ability to add to them? Any of them that allow weight gain related content?
If not any of that, does anybody know of a game engine or website with a simple interface designed for writing stories with branching chapters? I remember images for The Pokemon Village while it was in progress showing what looked like story nodes being connected together, though Iām not sure what that was.
And for reference of personal ease of access, TextAdventures standard engine left me confused, and the other left me realizing how convoluted just making a few branches would become. Though, if there is an alternative to TAās Quest or the other one that might be good for others to see, Iām donāt want to hold anyone back from sharing information that could be gold to someone else.
Also, I suppose if any is curious or was wondering, my username in Writing is āwhatā, so if you are able to catch a chapter before being blocked out, thatās where you can find it.
Itās not quite what you are looking for but you may want to look at AI dungeon, it is at least partially interactive and you can play and edit stories other people have created. One great thing is when the AI is on point it can actually tell quite a good fats story. - Itās free and such so doesnāt hurt to give it a try!
Twine is the platform of choice for a great many text-based adventure games/interactive stories online and it takes basically zero programming knowledge to utilize the base features. A quick look at a tutorial online will tell you all the basics that youād need to get started. Twineās interface makes it easy to visually construct branching story paths, with the added functionality of adding in coding should you so desire. For instance, if you wanted to make it such that choosing certain paths dictated the choices available to the player later on, you could have a check that would only present the options which have had their prerequisite conditions satisfied while hiding all the others. This could help to keep stories from going off the rails as was all too common back in the writing[dot]com days. Of course, the Twine file would only be able to act as a repository for the final story chapters, so if you were looking for a collaborative effort you might have to get creative.
The short answer to the original question is: not really, no.
At least, not in terms of interactives. It is kind of dirty of writing.com, but the interactive stories are locked behind a paywall. Iāve been a paid member for a couple years myself, and a large part of the reason why I got the basic membership was just how unusable the site was without it.
Click next chapter, canāt see it. āHigher then expected server volume.ā
Try to post, nope. āServers are just STUFFED with people.ā
Add in the new version of DA making their search engine almost painful to use, and itās been a frustrating time to seek a good WG story, lol. Iāve seen some good stuff on Feeder Fantasy and Curvage, though what either site has in terms of interactives, I couldnāt say.
Now, if youāll excuse me, I feel a sudden urge to check out AI Dungeonā¦
It has been admitted/outright stated by the owners that any non-paying user of the site is seen as a leech (even if they produce content on the site for free which may encourage people to actually pay) and that the Interactive sectionās use of bandwidth is seen as detrimental compared to more āseriousā writing things on that ancient, unchanging (though somehow enough under the hood to prevent people scraping interactives to preserve them) site.
Thereās been previous talk about developing and hosting a substitute here or elsewhere but this gets bogged down in the question of what exactly a better version of Interactives would look like.
Those quotation marks are definitely well placed, lol. The next Tolkien or Rowling certainly isnāt posting their material on there. I mean, they let me in, which was their first mistakeā¦
Ah, yes, AI Dungeon is a really cool resource for sure! I remember first finding it when the group from Corrider Digital first toyed around with it, itās come a long way since then. Iāve messed around with it for a little bit, and itās pretty good when it doesnāt lose itself. Both good for lone roleplaying and wacky idea creating!
I think Twine might have been the thing I was looking for! Will definitely take some learning (as all things do), but itās super simple to use. Probably wonāt be doing any condition related things right off the bat, but hopefully will look into that eventually. While not the answer for an open collaborative effort, itās incredible for personal writing endeavors!
Yeah, itās quite wild how crowded their servers apparently became, according to them. I recall back when you could at the very least read a solid few chapters before the servers were overloaded. Now if you exist for even half a second on the site itās like your mere presence eradicates any stability the servers had before your appearance, until you pay the fee.
I didnāt even know about DA poorly fiddling with their search engine, since I donāt use it all that much. Iāve never held much interest for what I could find on FF, but thatās probably due to preference in pacing, Might have to check out Curvage. I would be pleasantly surprised if any of them did have interactives though, would be pretty cool!
Would definitely be cool if those talks ever do develop into something, but in all honesty, I think Writing had it down pretty well. It was an incredibly simple but effective system. Kept it simple with a chapter title, the chapter, and a limited number of possible choices (perhaps 3 or 4 as a good limit here). Heck, even if there was a way to verify those currently funding this site, you could probably give funders more options such as access to giving more choices, imbedding images, or other goodies. Writing only allows those paying access to creating interactives, but Iām not sure that would be as effective here, since the community is just a bit smaller in comparison. The only thing I really feel that could have improvement is the outline for all of the chapters, especially when stories got long and had a wide variety of choices, but Iām not sure how that could have been fixed up.
Overall, I think simplicity and easy use might be the way to go if they end up deciding to create their version of the system, I donāt know if there are too many ways to really make it better. Might end up needing more monitoring in the end as well, seeing as how the tales will be a little more weight gain specific.
Ah, yeah, I was thinking of making a website for this. I wanted to start with freeforums but I ended up stopping because I didnāt really understand how the forums would work into story creation. However, there is one website which I think can easily serve the purpose and I was planning to make those forums surround it. It is called Neocities and it is a free web hosting site a lot like Geocities, but I think it may have more complex features potentially. It has never been done before, but you could write a branching story in it. But I donāt know how the user can share information. At the moment, Iām thinking maybe they could send emails or something through the site, if that is a thing that can be done. Otherwise, I would use the forums to organize the community content discussions.
Why am I avoiding Twine? It is pretty closed off and it doesnāt normally update for every user like a website would. Twine also has a pretty frustrating navigation system that would be surpassed just by using a web browserās features instead.
if anyone wanted to make a website that pays for itself some banner and sidebar ads would probably be enough to keep it up assuming that youāre not trying to earn a profit as opposed to funneling it back to the website domain and server cost
Well, Iām sure most of us know where to start - better site/funds management and user friendliness (namely, being able to use the site without a subscription). Small steps towards big goals, and all that.
The website itself is hard on free users (even those who registered with the site itself), especially regarding interactive fictions, as nowadays free users cannot go past a set number of chapters.