Hello all!
I’m interactive fiction fan from Russia. In Russia we have our own large IF community. Maybe even communities, because some people are fans of game books printed on paper, some are fans of Visual Novels, some are fans of text quests and so on. I try to cover this all areas, because it is very interesting. And I always wanted to get in touch with IF fans from other countries. So, here I am
To be absolutely honest, the main purpose of this post is to attract your attention to small IF game, which we created. Our small team is called NLB project. You can read about our game here:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/return-of-red-hood
The game is inspired by CYOA books, choice-based IF and, of course, by the well known story by Charles Perrault It is pretended to be an ‘easy reading for fun’. It has 45 different endings. The path for each ending is not very long, typically not more than 10 paragraphs, but the branches are mostly independent, so it is like 45 different stories in one. Some people say that they like the style of the book and its humor. Also it should be noted that the book was translated from Russian by the professional translator, so don’t be afraid, you don’t see my bad english in its text
Also the book contains music, mostly classical tracks from public domain, with some arrangements. Some music tracks are our own.
The illustrations from the book are actually 3D scenes created in Blender and rendered in Cycles. You can see some illustration examples on the book page on indiedb.
The engine used in our book is called INSTEAD, INterpreter of the Simple TExt ADventures. Check it out here:
http://instead.syscall.ru/
The main goal of INSTEAD is to create IF stories that are the mix of the classical IF games, Visual Novels and text quests. All things that I like
Branching storyline (which you can see in our trailer) was created in our own IF editor. I called it Non-Linear Book Builder. It is free and Open Source program. You can acquire its source code on
https://github.com/Antokolos/NLB
also you can download compiled and ready to run distro here
http://nlbproject.com/dist/NLBB_WithJRE.zip (version with included JRE for Windows, if you don’t want to mess with Java installing)
or there
http://nlbproject.com/dist/NLBB.zip (much smaller, Java-only version. Requires some tweaking of the run scripts (you should define the Java installation directory on your computer))
Unfortunately, for now the editor provides export only to russian-specific IF engines, including INSTEAD. But I want to add support for some more engines, such as Undum, maybe Ren’Py. I just need to become more familiar with this engines.
If you have any questions, please ask. We will be grateful for any feedback.