Among Stars Without Number: Writing For Interactivity

I've wanted to work on a piece of interactive fiction for a long time. Since at least Secondary school, I've been writing stories in my own time and always wanted to fuse my love of games and written fiction together. One of the earliest experiences I had with interactive fiction was an Ian Livingston Fighting Fantasy book I found in my school library, and it blew me away. The idea that you could store so many different paths and stories in 300 pages of paper was astounding to somebody who had been raised with video games. I wanted more and quickly grew to love pen and paper roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons, but something still held Fighting Fantasy dear to my heart.

Its been about 6 years since I last read a Fighting Fantasy book however. I've been writing my own stories and ideas since. Some have gone on to inspire my uni projects, while others likely won't see the light of day. I love writing and creating characters, and wanted to try a new way of bringing that to life through games.

By chance, I found a piece of interactive fiction called Creme de la Creme on the appstore. Its a wonderful story of romance and coming of age in a fictional boarding school. It has intrigue, romance and well written characters and dialogue. I completed two seperate readings as entirely different characters and had an amazing time exploring the different twists and turns of the story. I wanted more and began to dig up some information.

Creme de la Creme, as well as many other pieces of interactive fiction, was made using Codescript, a bespoke coding language designed for IF. I had experience with Twine, a similarly designed development app for Interactive fiction, but rapidly began to prefer Codescript's coding methods as I practiced with the application. Below you'll find an example of some of the work in the editor, and how its presented in game. As I worked, a new idea began to build in my mind. Romance suits interactive fiction as its almost entirely driven by the player's interaction with characters, and while it is a feature in many games it is rarely the main focus.

So I set myself a challenge. Create a story about romance using Codescript to eventually release and publish. Quickly, I began to put together other elements, honing in on Science Fiction as a genre, and beginning to form some ideas for characters and story events to build from.

In short, the player is a colonist searching for a new home for humanity. After finding a possible home, they land but soon make first contact with an advanced alien species. The player's interaction with both the aliens and their human crewmates could either spell peace, or calamity.

This blog will be updated regularly to talk about writing the story itself. Codescript's coding language is fairly understandable, so I will be including some screenshots from my editor, as well as some character design documents detailing certain members of the crew and the aliens you might meet.