Narrows: online storytelling system

https://emanchado.github.io/narrows/

by ingve • 9 years ago

68 18 9 years ago

emanchado.github.io

howderek• 9 years ago

When I was 13, I remember setting up a forummotion account for this exact purpose. I know that many others have done the same. Very cool to see dedicated software for this purpose!

disposedtrolley• 9 years ago

That's so awesome! Glad to see there's still people working on interactive fiction. Some of the best times I've had were spent playing IF games like Jigsaw with friends.

nebabyte• 9 years ago

Novel one-to-many and many-to-many interactions - text and otherwise - are always a fun thought exercise.

They all seem in that halcyon realm of "Next big thing just waiting to be made".

pmoriarty• 9 years ago

If you're in to that sort of thing, you probably already know of a game called Exquisite Corpse,[1] and maybe a group called Oulipo.[2] If not, check them out.

They both predate the Internet and personal computers, but are still very interesting, creative, and inspiring.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo

trynewideas• 9 years ago

I need some time (maybe this weekend) to toy with this, but I'm curious if op or anyone who's stood it up with real folks is willing to compare it to the interactive fiction game/toy Storium (https://storium.com/). On first blush it looks very much like the early versions of it without the more gamey point/token/card mechanics.

emanchado3• 9 years ago

Hey! Author here :-)

I did know Storium! It's very similar indeed but I decided to write my own because it didn't quite fit my vision.

1) I have an intense hate for challenge-based RPGs, and I hate when players have to do math or focus on calculating if they have enough points of whatever nonsense to reach some target.

2) I didn't want players to write part of the story text themselves because I wanted all that text to have a single voice/style. NARROWS has a way to "export" a narration as a kind of novel, and it reads more or less like a normal short story.

3) I wanted it to feel as immersive as possible, and have as little UI (for the readers) as possible. Having an audio track and a background image for every chapter was important to me. It might be a petty thing, but as I had decided to write my own anyway...

Aeolun2• 9 years ago

I tried installing this on a $5 DO box, but I ran into so many errors that I gave up after an hour.

Why is anything nodejs based always so godawfully horrible to install. Why do I need to compile a thousand libraries?

voltagex_• 9 years ago

Where'd you get stuck? What distro and what version?

I will say that https://github.com/emanchado/narrows/blob/master/README.md#i... could have been almost completely scripted.

JustSomeNobody• 9 years ago

Node devs could learn a lot from php devs. I've installed a number of php apps on my server at home and it was a breeze.

emanchado3• 9 years ago

Care to submit an issue to GitHub? I'm a bit surprised that you would run into many errors, if you really have Node >= 4 and npm >= 4.

Aeolun2• 9 years ago

The main issue is that I cannot compile one of the libraries node needs without more than 512MB RAM, not your fault, and not really something I can submit a ticket to your repo for. It's just a fault in the mechanics of NPM/whatever library was used.

sudosteph• 9 years ago

It's a cool idea! I've been toying around with some Interactive Fiction tech, was thinking about making a collaborative story-telling experience, except using slack as the base platform. Was thinking you could use Amazon Lex + slack bots as interactive NPCs, and channels (and private channels) to represent locations. I hadn't considered how the GM would work, but I'll read into how they're doing it here.

I don't have time to actually build this though, or the patience to even read most IF so I'm sure I would lose steam quickly, but it would be a cool project (which anyone reading this is welcome to run with).

throwanem2• 9 years ago

I've actually done something like this, a couple of times, on a much more ad-hoc basis, writing interactive fiction one response at a time in collaboration with another guy who wrote commands like you would to an Inform parser.

It was fun to play and received a degree of general acclaim, but it was also a lot of work! If I were building tooling in support of a similar game, the first thing I'd write would be a bot that'd observe and correlate directional moves, "look"/"examine" commands, and the like, with their responses - and, when a previously visited location or a previously examined object were encountered again, give the author the option of reissuing the previous response, with or without prior editing. Such a bot could also be preloaded with responses to commands likely to be issued during a game.

Inventory management, and object management in general, would be another high-payoff automation target. Remembering what's where, both on the map and in the player's inventory, is a drag and severely error-prone; a bot tracking TAKE, DROP, and like commands, or even just able to be told by the author of object status changes (or both!), will both save a lot of time, and greatly improve the flow.

In my experience, it's easier for players to remain involved and engaged, and the game to remain enjoyable, when responses come quickly - although I'm not too sure this isn't an artifact of my having played these games in a public Slack channel, which necessarily has a certain performative aspect about it. Games with a smaller audience, or no audience at all beyond those actually playing, might not have such concerns. In any case, having a bot that's seen what came before and can reproduce it without manual effort, but also gives the author a chance to modify those responses where necessary, saves a lot of work that could be better spent on imagining and describing a compelling story, and would thus I think be a good place to start.

How to scale the game to multiple players, I have no idea - for classic interactive fiction, that'd more or less mean multiple games running in parallel, so the model doesn't really fit. For something more like a multiplayer RPG, I'm not even sure where I'd start.

(One other note - unless there's a very compelling reason otherwise, I'd lean by default to an open source offering like Mattermost or Rocket.chat over Slack for this. On the one hand, Slack's pricing model and rolling archive on the free tier lack appeal; on the other, some of the tooling we're talking about might well be more effectively built as part of the platform than as user scripts or as bots interacting with webhooks. I've used Slack, and it is very good! But another similar platform might be better for this use case.)

esfandia• 9 years ago

I always liked this idea of a "ruleless, diceless RPG". I was always too lazy to read the RPG manuals, I didn't necessarily like the Tolkien universe, and I never liked randomness in battle outcomes. So the only way you could get me to be the gamemaster was to just let me create my own universe and let me decide on the outcome without resorting to dice. Usually plain common sense is enough: if you decide to attack a fully armed soldier barehanded, well you just die.

throwanem2• 9 years ago

Rules and dice exist because inventing a compelling collaborative story is hard. They let you concentrate your effort on the parts that really count, and handwave past the parts that don't with a decent mix of low effort, reasonable verisimilitude, and a chance, if you want one, for something to happen that puts a new twist in the story.

sbergot• 9 years ago

Agreed. It also introduces an element of surprise. And also gives you a source of narra "constrains" while you are playing. This tends to help everyone come up with interesting ideas. I lean toward games like dungeon world (http://dungeon-world.com/downloads/Dungeon_World_Play_Sheets...) that provide a set of lightweight rules and teach how to keep the flow of the adventure so that everyone has fun.

soneca• 9 years ago

Loved the idea, but I would prefer if it was a ready-to-use web product. Not something I have to install myself, complete with a db and server. Even a desktop app would be better.

emanchado3• 9 years ago

Yeah, I understand that. I wrote it mostly for myself and although I was planning on sharing the code all along, from the start I realised that most people wouldn't be able to, or wouldn't bother, to install it.

I have actually been thinking of buying some domain and having a public installation that anyone can use (I'd have to change some things, like add a "Forgot password" feature and such)... but I'd have to pay for it myself, and it might become a maintenance burden. So I dunno.

Narrows: online storytelling system

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