Online Episodic IF With Vorple

This is really out there, but:
Is it possible to create IF with Inform7 that can be played online in short “episodes?” Is there a current example?

What I mean by episodic might be something like Gardening for Beginners, nitku.net/if/gardening/ , but each Book Scenes would be a different episode, played over several days or weeks.

Maybe a prior question is, is it possible to create IF with Inform7 that can be downloaded and played offline in short “episodes?”

Both would probably require some way of tracking the player’s current status within an episode or series. Could Vorple be used for tracking in the online version?

For offline play, you can save important state in a text file (see chapter 23.13).

For online play, you can connect to any web technology with Vorple. That’s the usual very wide range of possibilities, from cookies up to writing your own web service to handle player accounts.

Great. Thank you. I will look into both of your suggestions.

Very interesting.
Episodic IF is a concept that would work well in theory, but there are few examples that actually work well. (Eighteen rooms to home comes to mind). Thanks to Telltale, it seems most game devs are exploring the concept, such as Square Enix and others.
I’d like to see an episodic game using vorple that takes full advantage of its web capabilities.

One of Textfyre’s goals was to create episodic IF. It’s an excellent idea that I would love to see explored, especially if there were educational overlaps. When I pivoted the company to educational platform development, my idea was for students to “play” a story every week along with the 36 chapters in their textbooks (there are 36 weeks in a school year in the U.S.). Each story would build on knowledge of the previous story, but add additional knowledge based on new targeted educational items.

Of course this is no small endeavor. Intertwining approved and required material, mixing disciplines (math, science, history, geography), and then telling an interesting story…it was not a trivial vision.

1 Like

My goal is educational as well, although its more for educating adults and some very esoteric subjects. I expect the games to be played on iPhone and Androids. And want to keep the episodes playable in 5-10 chunks. My daughter, on the other hand, is interested in using IF for teaching literacy skills for 3-8 graders. She is confined to iPads. Frankly, being a newbie to IF, I’m still stuck in learning Inform7.

I’ll once again mourn Storynexus, as they had amazing support for creating new content and blocking it off for testing so a large world could be expanded infinitely - almost exactly how Fallen London creates new content and gated “entry fee” stories.

1 Like

Agreed. I will forever miss storynexus. It was one of my favorite online IF systems. I never made anything for the site, but the works I played on the site were great.

As a newbie, I am unfamiliar with storynexus. What I am interested in is what’s now possible, especially for multi-episode education.