Are you interested in text adventures, CYOA, Twine games, or other sorts of interactive fiction? Do you want to let your writer know you'd be happy to receive something along those lines? Are you looking for someone to write IF for? This post is for you.
(I copied and pasted this directly from last year which was also copy pasted from previous years. Let me know via comment or discord ping if any of the links broke or anything else needs editing.)
What is IF?
Interactive Fiction (IF) covers everything from text adventures through to visual novels, by way of all sorts of experimental works. It can be mostly a game, or mostly a story; it can be a way to immerse the reader, or to play around with the concepts of storyteller and audience; it can be an exploration of chance, or of fate; it can be a straightforward story, or something else entirely. From Healy's post:
[IF] is a term used for games which are made up primarily of text, like
Adventure, Zork, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and other text adventures, or more experimental hypertext works like
My Father's Long, Long Legs, or even visual novels. Interactive fiction these days is generally divided into two groups based on how you interact with the game: parser-based IF, and choice-based IF.
Parser-based IF, more commonly known as text adventures, are controlled by typed in commands, like "GET KEY", "OPEN DOOR", "GO NORTH", "LOOK UNDER BED", and stuff like that. Not every command you type in will work, though, so they're hard to get used to if you haven't tried them before. To make things easier,
here's a card of most of the common commands. Some good parser-based IF to try first would be Ryan Veeder's
So, You've Never Played a Text Adventure Before, Huh?, Admiral Jota's
Lost Pig, Andrew Plotkin's
The Dreamhold, and Adam Cadre's
Photopia.
Choice-based IF is simpler; you just pick from a number of options. This can be done through hyperlinks and other clicky selections, though more rarely you may have to type a number from a list. Good examples of choice-based IF include Anna Anthropy's
Star Court, Alan DeNiro's
Solarium, the various games hosted by
Choice of Games, and most every given visual novel.
Writing IF for Yuletide
IF is considered opt-in for Yuletide - please don't write it for people who don't want it. If you aren't sure whether it would be welcome or not, ask a mod to check with the intended recipient.
You are still required to follow the normal rules, such as focusing on requested characters (unless the recipient has said you needn't include them all).
It can be hard to figure out what word count an IF story really is - what you've written is full of code that doesn't count, and what your recipient sees may vary in length depending on their choices. If you're posting to the main collection, try to overshoot the minimum requirement a bit, just to be on the safe side. Say a minimum of somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 words. Or probably about 10 to 15 minutes play through.
If your post to the main AO3 collection is under 1,000 words (e.g. you're just linking to an online playable version elsewhere), please drop the mods a note so they know it isn't someone posting something under the minimum, and provide them with an estimated word-count.
If you're writing a treat, unless it includes over 1,000 words of text and you're also sure your recipient would be happy with it as a main gift, please post it to Madness
Your recipient does need to be able to access what you've created! Please link to a suitable IF interpreter if required, or if possible make a web-playable version.
Requesting IF for Yuletide
If you would be happy to receive IF this year, please leave a comment below, following this template:
IF Canons Nominated for Yuletide
Plenty of IF canons get nominated for Yuletide! While it's still important to ask before writing IF for someone, someone who consumes IF already will probably be more interested in getting it. (Some of these canons were adapted into other mediums, so it's possible that someone who's interested in one of those isn't at all into the IF side of things. Thus why it's important to ask.) Consider requesting or offering one of these if you're interested in IF for Yuletide. For 2025 moontyger thoughtfully composed a list of IF canons in the tagset, available here:
Interactive Fiction in the 2025 Tagset!
Some IF Tools
A * means they can make web-based games.
Parser-based
Inform*: One of the biggest development tools for making parser-based IF. Has an English-like code. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Quest*: Another big IF development tool. Has a click-and-point editor with the option to check out the code. For Windows and web.
TADS*: A long running engine for writing interactive fiction, though generally not as easy to use as Inform. The latest version can make web-based games, although they need to be hosted on a non-https address or on the IFDB.
Choice-based
Twine*: Very popular tool for making choice-based IF. Has a visual editor, with some code-y bits for variables and the like. Can be extended with some Javascript passages. Available for Mac and Windows, and Twine 2 is web-based. See this comment for more notes.
ChoiceScript*: Used by the fine folks over at Choice of Games. Uses simplified Javascript to make games. It's very stat heavy. Requires a text editor. See
this comment for notes.
Ren'py: Engine for making visual novels. Uses a simple scripting language. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and can make games for all those platforms.
Inklewriter*: A completely web-based engine for making CYOA-style games.
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