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Hey, if anyone is familiar with the old school parser based interactive fiction, I'm currently trying to recruit a few good CYStians for a writing jam on another site this weekend. There is this program called ADRIFT (the site is as old as this one and the color scheme hates you, please wear protection) which is designed for complete beginners to just pick up and start using with no coding knowledge. It's Windows only, but everything is just clicking or selecting from drop downs and typing your story text in boxes. With a traditional game you create locations, you link them up into a grid map and describe them, then you create and describe the objects in the locations. There are 'tasks' that work like simple scripts, where you pick actions and restrictions from drop down boxes and then type the response the player gets when they use the right command. There's a lot of complex stuff possible too, RPG systems and the like which those of you who played Skybreak! a few months ago would have seen, but it's fine to remain blissfully unaware of how all that works and just make a normal game. But the prompt for the jam is very simple: http://forum.adrift.co/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=12681 And as you can see, the games are supposed to be "narrative focused" so this is ideal if you just want to ignore all of the above and use the program to write a normal CYOA. It's a tiny community so there's just a handful of people entering so far, and any games are going to be really simple so this is a good no pressure way for beginners to get their feet wet. I'll have an example game file for making CYOAs uploaded in a bit. Although, I'm using the newest version of the program, and the old 4.0 is actually a lot simpler and fine for a straight CYOA, you probably wouldn't even need a guide in that case. It's not even necessary to join their forum to participate, but if you do the answer to the question it asks is 'Campbell'. (But also just be aware the forum software is very old and appears to be slowly disintegrating right now, so if it doesn't send you your activation email or whatever just let me know and I'll have an admin manually activate the account.) Anyway if you need more details you can message me, now that Alex has fixed messages YAAAY!

There is a pretty extensive one actually: http://help.adrift.co/ CYS is obviously still superior for CYOA style games, plus actually getting feedback, but there's still something to be said for the immersion and flexibility that a parser IF system allows. And writing a quick branching game with it is a good way to learn the basics that can be applied to lots of other ideas. A dungeon crawl with stats and roaming enemies and random encounters wouldn't actually be that difficult to do, for instance, while you need BerkaZerka levels of mastery to pull that off here. Or a game about exploring every inch of a creepy house for secrets and hidden passageways, which is an IF staple but a difficult experience to pull off in a CYOA when the player just has it spelled out for them "Look at the loose brick over the mantel" in a clickable link. Both systems have different strengths, and I think there may be a lot of overlap as far as interest in their games and ours. And the ADRIFT community is so tiny we could basically just build our blood-stained ziggurats over their grass huts and no one would complain, they're a handful fo pretty chill guys I've known for years anyhow. And the key thing we have that they've been lacking over the years is what we already have, an audience of people who not only play text games but (sometimes) give feedback.