Interactive Fiction Viability?

[ThisAdamGuy]

A few years ago, I found about about Twine, a really easy to use program for making text adventures and interactive fiction. Seriously, coding and programming usually goes right over my head, but I had Twine figured out in less than an hour.

Lately I've been thinking about trying my hand at writing a visual novel, but I'm even worse at drawing than I am at coding, and I don't have the money to commission an artist for the hundreds of pictures I would probably need. But it got me thinking, could there possibly be a market for interactive novels like what you can make with Twine? Essentially, a visual novel without the visuals? I know it's a massive long shot, but I find the idea intriguing anyway.

 

[Tyranomaster]

I've played some niche games like that. I mean like, really niche. I'd say the market you'd expect is about 50 to 100 people. I've done a little work with using AI + Controlnet + Lora Training to allow me to have better control over characters for scene creation. Basically, the *no artwork* at all stuff that I saw that had that small number of people was from like 8 years ago. Now, the bar might be higher. Like, hypothetically sure, it could exist and if the story is compelling enough you might be able to do something (or if you tap into the old Zork nostalgia). Hypothetically, maybe a few tens of thousands would be interested in it if you thread the needle perfectly.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Most of the successful experiments with this that I've seen were marketing attempts tied to something else (IIRC the TV series Lost used a story like this as promotional material at one point)- though the very first one I ever heard of was a Halloween horror story, that I literally found out about two days before it ended (and was only left up for about two weeks before they moved on to another project and archived it). There was also a spy one, done as much like a game as a story (and, IIRC, you could buy gear and the ability to go back to an earlier decision and pick the other path) - was considering checking it out but some friends had played it since it started and found it not worth the time (or any money).

 

[Ai-chan]

Write it, then tell chatgpt to code it in python, then insert the code into ren'py. Now you have a windows gamebook, built on a visual novel engine, that you can sell through gog or itch.io