These are my works of interactive fanfiction, or fanmade text adventures, if you will. Think of classic computer games like Zork and Colossal Cave Adventure, in which the world is explored purely via text and you interact with the game by typing simple commands. Puzzles are fairly common, and back in the day said puzzles were notorious for being hard and often unintuitive. Text adventures are an old genre, and a fairly niche one today, but something about them appeals to me (as I've written about at length) and I've wanted to try my hand at them for a while.
Since old-school text adventures do come with that frustrating reputation these days, and because their nichey nature means they're likely to be very new to most people visiting this website, I've done what I can to keep my games as simple as possible and provide what I hope is at least passable help when it comes to getting started. Most games should include some built-in help text, hints or possibly tutorials of some sort for larger works, and the puzzles should not be wilfully obtuse. Games should also include a link to this cheat sheet in PDF form. The cheat sheet teaches common commands and basic command structure, so while it's too generic to be a specific tutorial about any individual game, it should demystify the basics of interacting with text adventures.
That said, I'm still very new to writing interactive fiction, so bugs or other playability issues are not at all unlikely. If you think something is broken or not responding appropriately, please contact me to report the issue.
Newer pieces are generally closer to the top. The title, genre, rating and approximate length of each story is provided below, as well as a one- or two-sentence synopsis or teaser and/or other notes about the piece.
Playing the Games
You have two options for running my interactive fanfics: you can play them directly in your browser as long as it's reasonably modern, or you can download them to play offline. Playing in-browser is highly recommended, as downloading the games for offline play requires additional software. That said, if the in-browser method doesn't work for you, or if you're interested in playing a lot of interactive fiction/text adventures anyway and thus will get some good mileage out of the extra software, here's how to use the downloads:
- Download the game you want. Each listing below contains a download link that should give you a .gblorb file.
- The .gblorb won't do anything by itself, so you need a piece of software called an interpreter. Think of it like needing a media player app to listen to your .mp3 files. Various interpreters are available for Windows, Mac, Linux and possibly more if you do a bit of digging, although their age, compatibility and quality varies widely. For most users I would recommend Lectrote (Win/Mac/Linux). You may also have luck with Gargoyle (Win/Mac/Linux), although I've had trouble getting it to work on Mac recently. Android users can try Fabularium; if that doesn't work, you may just have to stick to the browser version. Unfortunately I'm unfamiliar with iOS and can't make any recommendations; just search "glulx interpreter" on the App Store and see if anything comes up.
- If none of these work or you don't see a suggestion for your OS/device, Google "interactive fiction interpreter (name of your device)" or "glulx interpreter (name of your device)" or search that term in your device's app store and see what comes up. Basically, just make sure the interpreter you choose can read the "Glulx" or "gblorb" format and you should be fine.
- Run your interpreter and open the .gblorb file you downloaded. It should start up the game and allow you to type at the ">" prompt.
Special Order
Play it: Play in your browser • Download to play offline (requires an interpreter)
First Posted: 2017
Status: Complete (release 1/171202)
Length: One-room game, Short (~2min if playing optimally)
Genre: Fantasy
Content Rating: PG/K+. Contains a little bit of strong language.
A small and entirely pointless work of interactive fantasy fanfiction about an irritable teenager and how a list of instructions and the family pets are personally inconveniencing him.
I've mentioned here and there that one of my ongoing projects is building the world of Arilterra, a sort of high-fantasy-ish setting with elves and dwarves and all that nonsense but also with pokémon. This is a quick and silly vignette that I wrote mostly just to say that I've done something with the concept. The game itself is very short and can likely be completed in minutes; its few "puzzles" are not intended to be difficult, no matter how much the protagonist whines that they are. That said, help is available in-game if needed (try typing "help" or "hint"), and if you're inclined to look around at the various objects in the room, even if they don't actually contribute to the story, there's a bit of extra worldbuilding detail that I scattered about as a bit of practice. Said detail isn't really explained because this game is too tiny to bother with that, but maybe it'll sound vaguely interesting. Maybe.
Basically, don't come into this expecting an epic on the scale of Game of Thrones but Daenerys is the Mother of Charizard or somesuch. If a slice-of-life morsel starring a lazy teenager who snarks about his disobedient pokémon sounds like it might be mildly amusing for a few seconds, though, here you go.