Forums » Creative Corner » Read Thread

Hey, folks! I’m an indie developer, and I just launched a new app that I think this community will enjoy: The Infinite Library.

It’s a choose-your-own-adventure app, but instead of being locked into a handful of pre-written choices, you can go anywhere and do anything—the app generates the story step by step as you play. Want to outwit an intergalactic crime lord? Unravel an ancient mystery in a forgotten temple? Befriend a dragon and start a tea shop? Fall in love in 1930s Los Angeles? It’s all possible, and every playthrough is completely unique. It even lets you restart the same story and take it in a totally different direction each time.

I’m a huge fan of tabletop RPGs like DnD or Savage Worlds, and I wanted to capture that sense of freedom within a written story that operates on your own schedule. The app functions like a library, with a catalogue of interactive stories across different genres, from sci-fi and fantasy to mystery and romance, and there’s even an audiobook option for every story in the app!

If you’ve ever wished for a book that bends to your imagination, I think you’ll love it. I’d love to hear what you think, and feel free to Ask Me Anything if you have questions!

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/infinite-library/id6740012378

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.alexanderwinn.InfiniteLibrary

This is more a community that exists for the actual community aspects and for writers to advise and support each other, not a huuuge amount of interest in AI writing. (And the bigger issue may be that nobody knows how to read.)

Ehh, I'm a bit skeptical about games that claim you can go anywhere and do anything. To accommodate all user choices, you also need to create a world that can react properly to anything the user chooses to do. That also includes creating characters that have realistic reactions to your choices. Making realistic characters is hard enough for human authors that I think it would be impossible for a machine to even come close. Machines can't even understand human emotions after all; they can only guess at what humans will do.

Even if an app were to make sufficiently realistic and unique characters (which I highly doubt it can do), a story still needs an author's invisible guiding hand to ensure that it has all the elements that make a story good. Character arcs, payoff moments for tension built through a narrative, unique plot twists etc. all require the machine to have an understanding of how words on a page can make a human feel (In DnD, the GM would be the one doing this).

I'm sorry if my words are incoherent. I'm an amateur myself when it comes to storytelling, but I suppose being an amateur means that I'm probably the most qualified one to say that this stuff isn't easy. The handicap of not being able to understand human emotions won't make it any easier.

Is this available on Windows, or just as a phone app?

I gave it a go. I was a journalist arriving on a Mars colony to report on the growing independence movement. It generates fairly convincing narration with some flavour. It's like reading a novel-length work. The choices you get move the story onwards a little at a time. But after a while I got the sense that there was no living author keeping track of some of the details of the plot. There was a meeting I was supposed to have, for example, which never happened. There was a street protest which took over the plot. No explanation of what happened to the meeting. Other details linked together OK.

After a while I came up to the pay wall and stopped. I don't know if the story would have eventually reached a satisfying conclusion, but there was a sense that my choices were affecting the story events.

Was it really any different than any other AI generated fiction? It's been awhile since AIDS, the wow factor is really gone so I'm not seeing how having an AI generate text around player input is going to be much of a selling point on its own.

I don't know - I haven't tried AI-generated fiction before, that I remember. No, it may be nothing very new.

I downloaded it, I'll check it out.