You are a Californian inmate firefighter, flying out to stop a wildfire in the sierras. You are also a native of this land, descendent of a proud line of firewalker shamans, but the blaze you're facing now is unlike anything you've ever seen. As you stand before it with your high-powered chainsaw, you'll will have to face the demons of your past. Depending on your choices, you may emerge tempered, reforged, or burned to a crisp. The choice is yours, Chief.

This is a game for adults. It has a fair bit of gore, violence, sexual elements, and touches on offensive topics. If that's not for you, turn around now, this site has plenty of other content that you will like better.

Despite the word count this is a short game: Typical time for one playthrough is 25min.

This game was an entry to Sherbet's "Summer's End Synnergy Contest". (I wanted it to be Quentin Tarantino, but it turned out David Lynch.)

It's 1942 and you are Karl Petersen—In another life, you'd still be studying for your doctorate in English Literature, but this isn't another life, and you've been assigned as second officer of the submarine U-156, patrolling the South Atlantic. So come on now, the Third Reich is at war and the Kriegsmarine needs you!

The game was made as an entry to END MASTER'S PROMPT CONTEST 4, with the prompt “A story about naval warfare.”

Content Warning: I thought this one would turn out on the lighter side, but the usual sex, violence, occasional torture and optional suicide crept back in (It also has language!). In cinematic terms think of Hemmingway and the Reservoir Dogs re-enacting the Omen on a submarine.

Regardless of word count, this is a short game: Playtime is only 20-30 min.

There are several storylines but only ONE TRUE ENDING.

In this near-future hard sci-fi noir story you are Patricia 'Mace' Angelside, an ex-cop who has a hard time adjusting to her role as a bodyguard for the heir of a business empire. Can you keep him save during his trip on a luxury space liner? And, do you actually want to? Depending on your answers, this might turn dark pretty quickly.

This is a game for adults: if you are under 18 please give this one a pass, there are many other stories on this side you can enjoy.

This is a relatively short game: Much of the word count comes from the breadth of choices you have. You'll likely reach an ending within 20 minutes of reading, but there are quite a number of major storylines to explore.

This game was started as contribution to Sherbet's Summer's End Synergy contest. The theme of the contest was a character coping with a bad event in the immediate past. I thought that would go well with a noir detective story. An important inspiration was William Hjortsberg's noir novel "Falling Angel," but I wanted to escape some outdated cliches of the noir genre. You might say I wanted to show another side of the Angel, hence the name of the story. Specifically I wanted a female protagonist and a sci-fi setting. To accommodate the noir theme near-future hard sci-fi capitalist world, ala "The Expanse" was an obvious choice. In the writing, the story got a bit out of hand, and eventually I had to quickly write another game (Rainbow-1) to have something to show by the contest deadline.

Everything looks calm right now: The usual mists are wafting in from the Red River at nightfall. They bring the same old smugglers sneaking into port, the same old harlots, making their rounds on the piers, and the same old bards, spinning their tales in the taverns. But, the good citizens are huddling in their warm little houses, speaking their prayers to Sol. They pray for order, stability and the holy law to protect them. Let's hope they pray really hard, because strange things are starting to happen on Rador's day, a burglary goes unreported, a work of art is destroyed, an ancient demon walks the street and there are whispers of snow.

In this story you step into the boots of Nyvella Begat, a young lass trying to find her way in a city filled with intrigue and adventure. But when a startling discovery disrupts your comfortable life, you must decide who you want to be, lest others seal your fate for you.

Fabrikant's note: This is the second version of Goldbird. The original game by Northwind was intended as a metaphor on fate. While there were quite a number of endings, fate would try to push you towards one of them. To see some of the rarer endings you had to assert your will through a series of decisions. The result was a puzzle where choices had delayed consequences, and branches were unlocked by combinations of choices. Mostly, this subtlety was mostly lost on the audience. With Northwind's permission I have rewritten the storygame in a form that is easier to navigate (though there are still some delayed choices and well-hidden branches to discover). The game still tells the same story, containing essentially the same branches, but I have added some small bits of my own, rearanged others, and told some events which were only hinted at in the original.

Any translation system that doesn't involve humans is AI. Not all translation systems are languague models (those that are not, mostly suck), but AI is a much broader term.

But I don't think there is an issue with using language models for translation if you tell it to "translate close to the original and conserve the tone, style, voice and nuances of the narration as a professional literary translater would". In the publishing industry translations are well established, and we wouldn't debate authorship of a translated work. Even machine translations are now fairly common in professional publishing, so it would feel weird if this site had a higher standard.

Obviously, don't use AI for creative writing---the results are just not good.

Edit: I use gemini pro, most of the time when I need to write in German (often multiple time a day), and most of the time it does a fairly good job.

I get what you are saying, and in the not-so-distant-past I may have been wondering about the same. But having been here for some months I think I am slowly starting to understand. It's not easy to put this into words, but I will try.

First note how wholesome and supportive this site is: consider the Secret Santa, and the ton of well intentioned advice and constructive criticism that you find on here. It is rare to find this sort of positive engagement anywhere these days.

There are negative comments and I understand what you mean by slurs. But if you look beyond the words you will not find many examples of actual slurs, i.e. speech that is meant to be discriminatory. Of course, somebody will reply lol, fag to this post. If you look past the obvious, you will find it is not used in a discriminatory way.

One consequence of the rough tone is that people feel free to speak their mind. And this freedom is valuable, especially on a writing site.

Here people will tell you when you misbehave (or they feel you misbehaved) but past transgressions are also quickly forgotten. I would much rather be on a site where someone tells me to shut up when I talk to much, than on a 'cozy' site where I can be banned for saying anything political but am free to annoy everybody for years without anyboy telling me.

So yes the responses you get here are not always nice, but if you read between the lines you will find that also those can be valuable feedback. Some people are not used to that anymore , which only shows you how rare it has become.

If anything bothers you, relax, this is only one webite, you can just turn your back on it at any time. If you get emotional about some comments it must be because you care abuot the site, so you are probably getting something out of it, right?