FractalFic -- new interactive fiction web platform

Hi all! I’m pleased to announce the brand-new platform for writing and playing interactive fiction, FractalFic!

FractalFic differs from other systems in that its stories are built from complete binary trees, which encourage players to loop back through many times and explore the fractal world without fear of choosing the ‘wrong’ path. Stories grow in size exponentially – how big will yours be? The system also allows players to submit their own art to illustrate their favourite stories, or open up their own works to collaboration.

The flagship story, Diamond Find, is built around a central 2^10 (1023 node) tree and is free to play: https://www.fractalfic.com/fractalfic/?story=1

Diamond Find was previously released on Android as a speed-reading trainer: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wolfbutler.DiamondFind&hl=en

Have fun, and I’d love to hear your feedback – or better, read your stories!

Christian
Wolf Butler Art & Software

There is also now a tutorial story that demonstrates basic story mechanics: fractalfic.com/fractalfic/?story=29

Interesting – that helps me understand what you’re up to. It looks like this system is designed for iterating through the same story over and over until you find the path through it (or find keys to unlock stuff to let you through). That’s an interesting design, a bit like Vicious Cycles (I think it was), the Bloomengine game.

One things that’s a bit concerning to me is the suggestion that you can’t have branches rejoin. Exponential growth isn’t necessarily a good thing… someone might want to write one ten-node branch without committing themselves to a thousand nodes total.

Good thought – the way around that would be, I think, to have multiple smaller trees, and add links at the end of all your branches, so that theoretically any route you take through the tree would link you out to the next one. That way, the story could cycle through a chain of trees rather than one massive one.

Thanks for checking it out!